Thirty years ago, the first issue of this magazine rolled off the presses.
It was 1987. A gallon of gas cost 89 cents. Ronald Reagan was telling Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” while the Bangles were telling us to “Walk like an Egyptian.” Andy Warhol had just died, and Colin Kaepernick had just been born. The Iran-Contra affair was the political scandal du jour, and the 24-hour news cycle became part of life when “Baby Jessica” fell down a Texas well and was rescued before a TV audience of millions.
Closer to home, Duke had just hired Steve Spurrier as our new football coach. Elvis Costello played to a packed audience in Cameron Indoor Stadium. And a talented young student named Melinda Gates earned her MBA from the Fuqua School of Business.
Meanwhile, here in the library, real history was being made. The card catalog was going online!
No longer was a system of tiny drawers and meticulously organized index cards the swiftest search engine. Now you could find any book held by Duke, UNC, or NC State with a few keystrokes. (Well, any book published after 1979. It would take years before the vast majority of our holdings had electronic records.)
Automation was all the rage. We were even testing a new circulation system that would replace handwritten call slips with scannable barcodes. Would wonders never cease?
Needless to say, a lot has changed in thirty years. But a few constants remain.
One of the cover models featured on Volume 1, Issue 1 of this publication was Jim Coble, then head of the Library Systems Office. Jim still works here today, now as a Digital Repository Developer. In fact, he’s one of nearly thirty library employees who have been here for thirty years or more. Commitment like that is unusual in today’s work environment. But it says something about the kind of place this is. Working in a library comes with many rewards, not least of which is an enlightened appreciation for things that last. You could even say it informs everything we do.
Jim Coble today and in 1987, when he appeared on the cover of this magazine’s first issue.
And because it’s more fun to celebrate the passage of time than to lament it, we decided to mark three decades in print with a makeover—our first redesign in ten years. It’s inspiring to flip through our past issues (all digitized now, of course) and see all the people we’ve profiled, discoveries we’ve made possible, and stories we’ve accumulated over the years.
But that’s the thing about libraries and stories. No matter how many we already have, we’re always collecting more.
Over the years, Deirdre McCullough has hand-picked thousands of library books to honor the memory of deceased Duke alumni.
The small white cards arrive at irregular intervals, some weeks only a few at a time. Then suddenly she’ll get a big stack that will take her hours to plow through.
Each card represents a life. Someone’s father or mother, husband or wife, child or sibling, condensed to a few basic facts. Name of the deceased, graduation year, name and contact info of the surviving relative providing the information. And finally, the most crucial detail: subject area. If some small piece of this person could live on in a book, what kind of book would it be? Please circle your choice.
It’s not a silly question. The dearly departed are about to become part of a book—or at least perpetually associated with one. And once that happens, who knows how many hands that book will pass through? How many conversations it will start? How long it will continue to be read and remembered?
This is how the process begins. It’s not a library service many people at Duke know about, because they can’t take advantage of it until they die. Nor are they likely acquainted with the person whose job it is to choose a book that will honor their memory. She mostly works behind the scenes, as she has done for the last thirty years.
But the care she takes in matching the right book with the right person is a comfort to countless strangers on the other end of those cards—not to mention a remarkable bit of librarianship.
Deirdre McCullough (“Dee” to those who know her) wears many hats.That’s not merely a figure of speech. She’s a hat person, and you’ll often see her sporting a colorful fedora or trilby at work. It’s part of her look. But the expression applies on a more organizational level as well. Dee knows how to do a bit of everything. She has worked here a long time.
Officially her title is Collection Development Specialist, and her broad areas of responsibility include library collection budgeting and financials, gathering and analyzing data on collection usage, coordinating approval plan purchasing for various subject areas, and initiating orders for an assortment of library materials, such as lost/missing replacements and faculty rush requests.
But she also handles a variety of “other duties as assigned,” including the Deceased Alumni Bookplate Program.
Here’s how it works. Duke has over 160,000 alumni around the world. During any given month, a few dozen will pass away. That’s why Duke’s Office of Alumni and Development Records conducts automated searches of published obituaries, using keywords to seek out individuals who went to Duke. Occasionally, the university will learn of a death from a family member, friend, or former classmate. Regardless of how the notification arrives, Alumni and Development Records conducts a verification process to confirm that the deceased is (a) actually a Duke graduate, and (b) actually no longer with us.
(The process exists for a reason. Embarrassing apologies have had to be made, although it rarely happens anymore.)
The person’s alumni record is then updated, and a condolence letter is sent to the next of kin. Included with the letter is a card family members can fill out if they want their loved one honored with a book in the library.
There is no charge for this modest remembrance. Nor does it matter which school at Duke the individual graduated from. In these long and winding stacks, there is room for all. When posted, the cards come to the library development office, where they are entered in a spreadsheet. Then they go to Dee.
That’s more or less how things have worked since 1985, the year the Deceased Alumni Bookplate Program first started. The internet has made the process quicker and easier, as you might expect. And the old paper bookplates that had to be glued inside a book’s cover have been replaced by virtual ones that are entered in a book’s online catalog record and initiate a pop-up plate. (Family members can more easily search for them that way.)
But otherwise not much has changed. For her part, Dee has been the one selecting the books since 2001, the year she assumed her current position. On average, she plates about 250 books per year in memory of deceased Duke alums.
When she first started, Dee says, she would simply pick a book related to the subject area indicated on the card.
“But then I started thinking, what if I’m picking something totally antithetical to who this person was?” she says. She started slowing down and being more thoughtful about the selections. “As the years have gone by, I’ve spent more time getting to know the individual.”
She starts out with a preliminary Google search, looking for an obit or online profile, any kind of digital trail she can follow. Common names like Bill Smith can be tricky, but she has various search strategies for narrowing things down, like specifying the person’s state, town, profession, or any other distinguishing characteristics she can find in the Alumni Directory.
The easy ones might take only five or ten minutes. But sometimes she’ll spend up to thirty minutes or more if an individual is especially hard to track down—or led an especially interesting life. The more personal she can make a book selection, the more it will mean to that person’s loved ones.
“The ones I really enjoy are when the obituary mentions places the person traveled or loved,” Dee says. Take the World War II veteran (Class of 1949) who served on a U.S. Navy gun crew that sailed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific and passed through the Panama Canal ten times. For him she picked Chronology of War at Sea, 1939-1945: The Naval History of World War II (2005).
A grateful thank-you note from his spouse confirmed the appropriateness of the selection. “You must have known that my husband spent those years mostly at sea,” it read. Another note reads, “It’s like you read his mind in selecting The Palmetto State,” this one from the widow of a banking executive (Class of 1959) who devoted much of his life to improving education, race relations, and cultural life in South Carolina.
If someone dies tragically young, or while still a student here, Dee spends extra time considering them. There was the pre-med junior from Jacksonville, Florida (Class of 2018), who passed away last year. She suffered from a lifelong immune deficiency disorder and died from complications of a bone marrow transplant at Duke Hospital. She had dreamed of becoming a pediatric immunologist. For her, Dee selected Attending Children: A Doctor’s Education (2006), a poignant memoir of a physician’s journey from nervous medical intern to director of a pediatric intensive care unit.
Then there was the younger brother of Duke basketball great Shane Battier, Jeremy, himself a Duke grad, decorated member of the football team, and successful entrepreneur. His untimely and widely reported death drew attention to the nation’s ever-growing heroin epidemic. For him: Child’s Play: Sport in Kids’ Worlds (2016), a collection of essays about the role sports play in how young people view themselves and their place in society.
But even the happy stories of long lives that ended well and peacefully get a carefully considered selection. No death is unremarkable.
Does it ever get to her, all these daily reminders of mortality?
“I’ve been known to shed a few tears over the more poignant obituaries,” Dee says. “But actually it’s given me a deeper outlook on Duke and the people who come through here.”
There’s the story of Duke we all know. The one-room schoolhouse that grew into a Gothic Wonderland, home to world-renowned researchers and Cameron Crazies. And then there’s all the individual stories of everyone who’s ever been a student here. Each one had their own particular Duke experience, which was just a chapter in their larger life story.
Few people have a more wide-ranging perspective of those stories than Dee, a Duke alumna herself.
A double-major in English and Anthropology, she graduated in 1987. As a student, she barely set foot inside the library, an irony she laughs about now. Three days after she earned her diploma, she started working here. Her first assignment was working as a Cataloging Data Input Clerk, transcribing paper bibliographic records submitted by catalogers on a computer in the Terminal Room. “They didn’t call it terminal for nothing,” Dee jokes.
Later she became part of the Cataloging and Searching Support Team, and she even spent a year as a copy cataloger before landing in her current position.
When she was first handed the bookplating assignment, she had to fuss with the three-by-four-inch bookplates on a manual typewriter. She doesn’tmiss those days. Now she can simply key in everything on the computer, and it becomes a virtual part of the book instantaneously.
She doesn’t have to keep the little white cards when she’s done with them. But because she works in a library, she has a hard time throwing records away. So they stack up in boxes and piles around her work area like little memento mori.
She also knows that, one of these days, her own name will show up on one of those cards (Class of 1987). Then it will be someone else’s turn to choose a book for her. But what do you select for the ultimate selector? What kind of book would be just right?
Perhaps something about the kindness of strangers. There can never be enough written about that.
When John Mishler (T’09) signed up for the “Changing Faces of Russia” FOCUS Program cluster in the summer of 2004, he had no way of knowing how big an impact that choice would have. In his first semester at Duke, the jumble of first-years Mishler met in his FOCUS seminar courses would develop into a tight-knit group of friends, sticking together across all four years of college and keeping in touch even now—over seven years after graduation.
John Mishler (T’09)
Today, these grateful alums are giving back.
As a tribute to the common academic experience that brought them together, Mishler and his FOCUS cluster friends recently made a gift through the Libraries’ Adopt a Digital Collection program to sponsor a striking collection of Soviet-era Russian propaganda posters. By offsetting the storage costs of long-term digital preservation, the program allows library supporters like Mishler and his friends to keep digitized collections like this one forever free and accessible for everyone.
An image from the Russian Posters collection that Mishler and his FOCUS friends adopted in honor of the academic experience that brought them together.
Why do they do it?
“My time at Duke was definitely a transformative experience,” Mishler explained. As a practicing attorney in Houston, Texas, and a national member of Duke’s Young Alumni Development Council, he feels he owes a lot to the university and the Libraries in particular. When they heard how much a difference a donation like this could make, Mishler said, he and his FOCUS cluster knew their alma mater was due for some support.
“It was a great experience, and I’d like to see more people participate in it,” Mishler said. “You know the Libraries, they make it so easy—you just click a button!”
An image from the Paul Kwilecki Photographs collection, adopted by Mishler in honor of a friend.
For people like Mishler, there’s no excuse for not getting involved in preserving some of the Libraries’ most valuable scholarly and cultural resources. “There’s such a huge variety of collections,” he said. “It’s easy to find something that catches your interest.”
About the Adopt a Digital Collection Program
Every year, the Duke University Libraries digitize thousands of items in our collections. These digital assets must be carefully managed to preserve them for generations of students and researchers to come. This work requires storage space, the specialized expertise of our talented staff, and you!
If you’re reading this magazine, we suspect you’re rather fond of libraries. (Correct us if we’re being presumptuous, but you have that look about you.) Whether you’re a bibliognost (someone with encyclopedic knowledge of books and bibliography) or simply like wandering around your favorite phrontistery (place for thinking or study), here are ten unusual bits of library lingo that are definitely worth knowing.
Example of an inhabited initial in Vegetius’s “Epitoma Rei Militaris” (c. 1400) from the Rubenstein Library.
Inhabited Initial
An initial letter in an illuminated manuscript or early printed book containing decorative animal, human, or imaginary figures, often depicted fancifully.
Tattle Tape
Thin adhesive strip of magnetized metal concealed within a library book, which triggers a security alarm if you try to remove the book from the premises without checking it out.
Many books printed in the nineteenth century are now brittle and falling apart because they were made with acidic paper made from untreated wood pulp, an inherent vice.
Inherent Vice
A weakness in the chemical or physical composition of a book or document that causes it to deteriorate over time.
Orphan Work
An out-of-print work protected by copyright for which the copyright holder is unknown. The question of who owns the rights to orphan works has been a major bone of contention in mass-digitization projects like Google Books.
The 1986 Dictionary of Literary Biography includes a reference to John Crowe Ransom’s Poetics, which was announced in 1942 by the publisher New Directions but never actually published. Its ghost lives on.
Ghost
A work announced or cited as published in bibliographies, catalogs, or other sources, of whose actual existence there is no conclusive evidence.
Cartonnage
Pieces of waste papyrus glued and tightly pressed together to form rigid sheets, used in ancient Egypt for making mummy cases. Many examples of ancient writing in Duke’s papyrus archive were recovered from mummy cartonnage.
Buckram The stiff poly-cotton cloth used to cover and protect library books. It is designed to withstand heavy use and resist moisture and mildew.
Incunabula
From the Latin word cunae, meaning “cradle.” Books, pamphlets and other materials printed from movable type in Europe prior to 1501, during the infancy of printing.
This rubber-armed manicule in a 1478 work on the lives of the popes and Roman emperors looks like it could belong to Mister Fantastic.
Fugitives
Pamphlets, posters, performance and exhibit programs, and other ephemeral materials produced in small quantities that are of transitory interest and therefore difficult for libraries to collect and catalog.
Manicule
In medieval manuscripts, a symbol of a hand with the index finger extended, used to draw attention to an important passage in the text. Think of it as an early form of highlighting. The name derives from the Latin root manicula, or “little hand.”
