Meat-packing magnet Sam Martz has given his 4,700+ collection of golf books to UBC.
It is the greatest collection ever assembled on the sport that will be kept intact and available for public perusal. Martz believes he has put together the third-largest collection of golf books in North America, behind the collection of the United States Golf Association and one that is in private hands.
The University of Chicago houses the collection of Arthur W. Schultz which is made up of 1,600 books but according to Ralph Stanton, head of rare books and special collections for UBC, “doesn’t come close to the depth of Sam’s.”
The goal is to catalog and make available online the entire collection.
There is one big problem; however, and that is that there is no extra monies available to process the collection. “Like the python that swallowed the pig, how do you digest all of that?” is how Stanton frames it.
So as great as this news is it is tainted by the reality that it could be years before the collection is fully cataloged and available.
This problem of unprocessed material awaiting the light of day is a significant one and not confined to UBC. Many special collections in university libraries throughout this country are spread so thin that it is an impossible task to properly process the material that is acquired.
I have touched on this issue before when writing about the guy who donated the world’s longest diary to Washington State University where it has lived in over 80 boxes since 1996 and has yet to be processed and when I asked the head of special collections when she expects the collections to be processed and available for public viewing she said “after I retire.”
Also see my previous post from last March, The “No Information Left Behind” Act, where I suggest that maybe a 1% digital archive tax on all new computers or a tax on universities that spend more money on their athletic programs than on their library programs could be enacted to help fund the processing of these collections.
What I am afraid of and what we don’t want to see happen is for potential donors who possess these great collections to bypass the library donation option due to the fact that their collections cannot be properly processed and cared for. Every collection that is ultimately broken up or disposed of elsewhere due to the inability of the library to properly handle it is a net loss for our society as a whole.