Concerned users of Hoover Library:

From the scores of email messages I received over the last few days, I gather there have been some extraordinarily misinformed messages about the future of the Hoover Library and Archives posted on various bulletin boards. Stanford has no plans to close Hoover Library or to reduce the funding for collections of either archival or non-archival materials.

The current situation:

The Hoover Library currently houses archives, special collections, rare books and documents, plus portions of the University's general collection in certain areas, such as Eastern Europe and Asia. The long and short of it is that Hoover Library is out of space. It cannot continue accumulating material in all of these collections without moving some of its holdings to another location, either to one of the auxiliary libraries (on another part of campus) or to an off-campus location. Thus the Hoover Library's current options are to stop collecting any new material or to store portions of its material at a relatively inconvenient distance.

The current proposal:

The Hoover Institution and the Stanford University Libraries have jointly submitted to me a proposal to ameliorate this situation. The proposal would involve moving the general library collection (i.e., the non-rare, non-archival material) to Green Library, Stanford's main library. (For those of you who are not familiar with the Stanford campus, Green Library is approximately 100 yards away from Hoover Library.) This move would allow all parts of the collections to continue to grow, and keep the material in rough proximity.

The proposal does not involve any budget savings. In fact, this fall I have received, and am considering, proposals to increase the budgets for both archival and general collections at the Hoover. If we move forward with this proposal, the budget for the general library collection, along with the relevant staff, will move to the main library, but the budget will not be decreased.

Access:

I imagine many of you, as outside users of Hoover Library, are concerned about whether this will affect access to the material. You will be pleased to know that the change will have benefits on that score. Users of Hoover Library will be allowed access to the general material stored in Green, though they will not be able to check out this material. (Since they are not allowed to check out material from Hoover at present, this is not an additional restriction.) They will in fact have increased access to the general material, since Green's hours of operation are considerably longer than Hoover's, and will also be allowed to browse and use any other material in the Green stacks.

The Hoover Library is a Stanford treasure, and the idea that we would close it or otherwise diminish it is absurd. The goal of the current proposal is to find the best way to continue building the collections, while still making them as accessible to all users as the harsh Euclidean realities of space constraints permit.

As I say, this is still just a proposed solution that we are currently considering. Before making a final decision, I will be consulting our local faculty who depend on all the Hoover collections, to make sure this is the best available option.

Trust me, the leadership at Stanford is not making a decision out of ignorance or financial necessity that would destroy a national research treasure like the Hoover Library!

John Etchemendy
Provost
Stanford University

This year's SUL-AIR Staff Holiday Party has been scheduled for Friday, December 15th, from 2:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Green Library, Bing Wing Rotunda. There'll be plenty to eat and drink, plus special performances by the Mountain View High School Madrigals, an acapella high school choir featuring 26 young men and women who perform a varied repertoire including madrigals, traditional and modern holiday music. Their music is very good -- garnering them a 2nd place slot in a recent national competition! There will be two, 30-minute performances slated to begin at 2:45 pm and again at 3:45 pm. And of course, we'll have our very own version of Kris Kringle holding court again this year with plenty of goodies for all!

The second floor computer cluster and technology service desk will remain open until midnight on Friday, December 8 and Saturday, December 9.

The Search/Order unit in Acquisitions has a new member. Melissa Aquino is filling the position of Domestic slip order specialist. Melissa has a varied background in the telecommunications industry and in radio. She is a Bay Area native, but comes most recently from Texas, where she worked for AT&T Wireless. Melissa's new position in Search/Order will involve her in ordering materials for all SUL subject areas, so she will have an opportunity to get to know many of you.

Alicia Gamez this week joined the Libraries as the new Curator for British and American History Collections. Alicia holds a Stanford Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature, which she completed in 1999. Her dissertation examined the interrelationships between scientific discourses of natural history and emerging notions of race in the United States from the late 18th through the early 19th centuries. Since then, she has been awarded a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a Library Resident Research Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. At Stanford, Alicia taught a course on "Chicana Cinema" for Writing and Critical Thinking and worked on a number of other projects.

Adan Griego will be acting as Alicia's library mentor while she becomes acclimated to SUL. She will also be working closely with Bill McPheron and me as parts of the "transition team," as well as the rest of the staff in the Humanities and Area Studies Resource Center. Until the end of August, while Alicia is completing her Berkeley fellowship, she will be working half-time; among her first priorities will be visits with faculty and learning the ropes of collection development as practiced at Stanford. I would be remiss if I did not at this time thank Bill for his heroic work as acting curator since Tomas Jaehn left the position about 18 months ago; I know that Bill will be pleased to refocus his work (and life!) on a shorter list of things to do. Please feel free to visit and welcome Alicia in her new office in the McDermott Suite.

After some 23 years, Mike Ballard has left the Stanford University Libraries for the wilds of Australia. where his new email address will be classconscious@hotmail.com. His last day was Dec. 5. In his years here Mike held a variety of positions, the most recent being Operations Manager of Media-Microtext Services and Senior Reference Specialist for the Information Center. To say we will miss him is an understatement, but we wish him all the best in his new adventure.

These selections reflect the compiler's notions of the humorous, wry, ironic or unusual, and should not be construed as reflecting any other opinion or judgment, nor the editorial opinion of SUL/AIR News. Contributions for this feature are eagerly solicited. Submit any oddities to: bkunde@sulmail.stanford.edu

The following were contributed by Rose Rajeff.

Cooking with mud : the idea of mess in nineteenth-century art and fiction / David Trotter. -- Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2000.
ybp100188277 / NX650 .M47 T76 2000 / Green Library.

Honey, mud, maggots, and other medical marvels : the science behind folk remedies and old wives' tales / Robert Scott Root-Bernstein. -- London : Macmillan, 1999.
a4117642 / R733 .R66 1999 / Green Library.

Marketing through mud and dust / Muzi Kuzwayo. -- Cape Town : Ink Inc., 2000.
a4402996 / [In process] / Hoover Library.

Mud & treacle : or the course of true love ; a shameless tract in three acts and a post-dated prologue / by Benn W. Levy. -- London : Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1928.
ACY6910 / 822.7 .L66M / Stanford Auxiliary Library.

Mud pies and other recipes / Marjorie Winslow ; illus. by Erik Blegvad. -- New York, Macmillan, 1961.
AFH2434 / PZ7.W7517 M8 1961 / Special Collections.