Endowment Funds Library Assistants

Littauer Foundation gift provides for students working in College Library's Judaica Division

By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

The Harvard College Library received $500,000 in January from New York's Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for an endowment to support student library assistants working in the Library's Judaica Division.

By generating an income of some $25,000 each year, the Littauer grant guarantees that Judaica will have the level of student help it needs to carry out its multifaceted mission, according to Charles Berlin, the Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica and head of the division. Berlin estimates that the grant will support about 10 students during the regular term.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such grant at Harvard for such a purpose," he said last week. The positions are formally known as the Littauer Judaica Student Assistantships. Ten students make up the first group funded by the grant.

In thanking the Littauer Foundation for its "very generous and innovative gift," Richard De Gennaro, the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, noted that similar student assistantships are needed elsewhere in the world's largest academic library system. Of some 8,600 students variously employed throughout the University, more than 1,000 work in the University Library.

"The Littauer grant comes at an especially crucial time," De Gennaro added. "With over 350 Judaica Book Fund endowments, Harvard maintains the most comprehensive Judaica acquisitions program of any university research library. At the same time, all other Judaica libraries have been forced to curtail their acquisitions programs because of financial constraints, and the situation is likely to get worse." These factors have increasingly made Harvard's Judaica holdings "the collection of last resort for Jewish Studies in the U.S." and all the more crucial to sustain.

Similar considerations surround cataloging. "Harvard is the only Judaica research library that has computerized its entire Hebrew catalog and made it available online throughout the world," De Gennaro said. Harvard also serves as the primary producer of romanized, computerized Hebrew cataloging data for the national bibliographic networks OCLC and RLIN.

Littauer Foundation President William Lee Frost '47 called the grant "a forceful statement about the need to support such programs. Coming in the midst of the current University Campaign, it is a most timely message, and we hope it will be very helpful to the Library in encouraging other donors to do likewise."

Amid today's widespread financial cutbacks, Berlin pointed out, grants such as the Littauer gift allow students to support themselves while performing intellectually challenging tasks.

"Our students are given an enormous amount of responsibility," he said. "The work is not mechanical or rote. All of it requires a great deal of thought and attention. Over the years, we've had some very impressive students who have done absolutely superb work. We'd be hard-pressed to do all we do without them. We have no lack of things to do, and fortunately, we have a very big pool of talent to draw on."

This abundance of projects matches the vast scope of the field, Berlin explained. "Judaica is really a global literature that has been published literally throughout the world in virtually every language since the beginning of printing. The single most important part, of course, is the Hebrew material. But the formats and materials range from printed books, pamphlets, newspapers, and periodicals through more recent developments like audiovisual materials and CD-ROMs."

Berlin believes that the Judaica Division has "the largest collection of Israel-related materials outside of Israel." And for decades, the division has collected and processed Israeli ephemera with a consistency unknown in Israel itself. As a result, Harvard has amassed the world's largest and most varied collection of Israeli posters.

A scholar might have to visit 30 or 40 sites in Israel to study much of the material conveniently gathered here, Berlin said. One student assistant, in fact, plays a critical role in making the Harvard materials widely accessible by preparing Israeli election posters for digitization before shipping them off for safekeeping at the Harvard Depository in Southborough, Mass.

Some projects require familiarity with Hebrew or European languages, while others demand sophisticated computer skills. One student, for example, meticulously prepares other Judaica materials for off-site storage at the Depository. Another pores over microfilms of dissertations from Israeli universities to create records for the HOLLIS electronic catalog. A third records the thousands of issues of Israeli newspapers and periodicals to which the division subscribes. A fourth processes European-language acquisitions (modern and antiquarian) related to Jewish affairs.

The Littauer gift puts Judaica closer to its fundraising goals within the University Library sector of Harvard's ongoing capital campaign. Berlin's position (est. 1959) and that of the Littauer Hebraica Technical and Research Services Librarian (1991) are already endowed.

"Our overall goal is to endow the entire Judaica operation," he said. That means raising an additional $4 million to $5 million to endow the remaining librarians' positions in the division.

"To deal with this vast range of material from all places, periods, and languages, we need librarians with a variety of skills, both intellectual and organizational," Berlin stressed. "By endowing a position, the donor would be ensuring that that element of the collection would always be in the hands of a skilled librarian who will develop it and make sure that we continue to build it."

Lucius N. Littauer, Class of 1878, and the foundation that he created have long supported the University Library, Jewish Studies, and other Harvard enterprises. In 1925, Littauer established the Nathan Littauer Professorship of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, the nation's first endowed chair in Jewish Studies. He also funded the Graduate School of Public Administration (1935; now part of the Kennedy School of Government) and the University Library's first Judaica Book Fund (1937).

Among the Foundation's many benefactions are the Harry Starr Chair of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature (1976), the Harvard-Littauer Judaica Endowment (1980; the University Library's first major preservation endowment), the Harry A. Wolfson Fellowships in Jewish Studies (1989), the Kennedy School's Harry Starr Auditorium, and Radcliffe's Louise Littauer Gallery.