Everyone on the UT campus knows about Hodges Library. We all have fallen asleep in one of those big green chairs and been glared at for talking too loudly on the quiet study floors. We print papers that are due in 10 minutes at the Commons, we use it as a cut-through between Pedestrian Mall and the Hill, and we buy our overpriced Starbucks at the store conveniently located within 10 feet of the front door. But an alarmingly small number of UT students have actually explored the heart and soul of the library: the books and the archives.
Yes, believe it or not, libraries still contain hard copies of books to check out, as well as rare manuscripts and university archives. In my opinion, the real tragedy of modern libraries is how their vast reservoirs of books and other papers are increasingly underused each year. It is becoming less common for a university student to know where the library books are, let alone how to navigate the maze of stacks organized by the Library of Congress classification numbers.
Don’t get me wrong — as a historian, I am indebted to online databases. The ability to access a Chicago newspaper from 1915 on my laptop is an amazing feat of technology. Researching becomes far easier and more efficient when you don’t have to fly to Chicago and fill out a form in order to access the original and probably crumbling piece of newsprint. There is also an abundance of peer reviewed journal articles available at the click of a mouse, as well as several legitimate scholarly Web sites available on the Internet. Even Wikipedia is becoming increasingly reliable as a source. (Note to my professors reading this article: I am not endorsing the use of Wikipedia as a source for a paper. I promise.) Of course, it makes perfect sense for fast-moving disciplines like the sciences to use technological sources to support their research. But when it comes to the study of people and the way they think and behave, it is hard to find a more reliable and enlightening source than a physical piece of paper.
Now, I am not talking about the modern mass-produced novel, or even the copies of books based on scholarly research, although both of these genres are valuable in their own way. The most enlightening and historically valuable papers are the personal papers of ordinary people that the average researcher rarely consults. I work in the Special Collections department of the library, which is the department that houses the rare books and manuscripts as well as the archives for the University of Tennessee. We process many bound pieces of paper that the vast majority of people affiliated with the university will never see, yet those pieces of paper contain more historical information than relevant websites or even textbooks.
One of the recent collections that I recently processed was a number of personal diaries and letters written by a man named Robert Tatum from the early 20th century. Tatum was an Episcopalian priest who lived in Knoxville during his later years, but as a young man he worked at a mission in Nenana, Ala. He is best known for being a part of the first successful climbing expedition to ascend Mount McKinley. The collection that the library possesses includes a diary that Tatum kept during the ascent, and because the 100th anniversary of the ascent is coming up in 2013, the diary is of great importance to researchers of the event. Although Wikipedia has a fairly informative section about the ascent of Mount McKinley, the personal experiences of one of the participants in the expedition provides far more enlightening information than dates and statistics. Tatum’s diary yields unrivalled information about the actual experience of climbing Mount McKinley and gives the event a human perspective instead of simply an event that occurred on a particular date. His descriptions of the landscape, the coldness, the strain of the ascent and the relationships between the expedition members provide invaluable insight into the actual experience of the first ascent of the tallest mountain in the United States.
It is true that sometimes items like personal diaries and letters are digitized and available online, and there is significant benefit to the fast access of this information. But feeling the weight of the diary in your hands and seeing the way the ink flowed across the page makes history come alive, and no Internet database can replace that kind of research.
— Sarah Russell is a junior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.
