Stevenson Library at Bard College

As we gear up for another semester in Annandale, the breeze brings the musk of last peaches, and grapes now, and tomatoes. There will be just under 1,400 students on campus this year studying everything from human rights to human anatomy, and using the Stevenson Library in more ways than ever before. More ways certainly than its earliest benefactor, Reverend Hoffman could have forseen when he shoved the cornerstone into place in 1893. An original collection that would have fit comfortably into a Chevy Tahoe, has grown to more than 300,000 volumes. The structure that he described with great pride as "magnifical" at the building's dedication received a playful postmodern make-over designed by Robert Venturi, one hundred years later, in 1993.

One of the great marvels of libraries, of course, is that in every aspect we are actively engaged with the past, with our various traditions, and with the future, the great "beyonding" of our imaginations. The works of Ptolemy and Stephen Hawking are open side by side; a bookcase that once belonged to Revolutionary War General Schuyler now sits in the midst of a wireless computer study area; students comb the stacks and the archives along with online journals and image databases. And it seems that the more teaching and research materials become available online, the more the library has become a kind of marketplace of ideas, a meeting place for students to test new ideas on each other. This would be the very idea Francis Bacon had in mind when he described learning as a cumulative, collaborative, experimental enterprise.

I have always associated reading with trouble. Love and trouble. Just think of Dante's Paolo and Francesca: "and time and time again that reading/ led our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale..." Of course, they end up in Hell. At any time reading might mean intimacy and community; excitement and danger; great risk and great reward. On the best days, when everything is working, this is precisely what engagement with people doing the work of education can be all about.

By Jeff Katz, Stevenson Library, Bard College

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