Гарвардская библиотека: История и коллекции имени Гарри Элкинса Виденера

Primary building of Harvard Library

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5million books in its "vast and cavernous" stacks, is the centerpiece of the Harvard College Libraries (the libraries of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and, more broadly, of the entire Harvard Library system. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was built by his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener after his death in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. The library's holdings, which include works in more than one hundred languages, comprise "one of the world's most comprehensive research collections in the humanities and social sciences." Its 57 mile (92 km) of shelves, along five miles (8km) of aisles on ten levels, comprise a "labyrinth" which one student "could not enter without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle." At the building's heart are the Widener Memorial Rooms, displaying papers and mementos recalling the life and death of Harry Widener, as well as the
Harry Elkins Widener Collection,
"the precious group of rare and wonderfully interesting books brought together by Mr. Widener",
to which was later added one of the few perfect Gutenberg Biblesthe object of a 1969 burglary attempt conjectured by Harvard's police chief to have been inspired by the 1964 heist filmTopkapi. Campus legends holding that Harry Widener's fate led to the institution of an undergraduate swimming proficiency requirement, and that an additional donation from his mother subsidizes ice cream at Harvard meals, are without foundation.

Like many large libraries, Widener originally classified its holdings according to its own idiosyncratic systemthe "Widener" (or "Harvard") systemwhich (writes Battles) follows "the division of knowledge in its [early twentieth century] formulation. The Aus class contains books on the Austro Hungarian Empire; the Ott class serves the purpose for the Ottoman Empire. Dante, Molière, and Montaigne each gets a class of his own." In the 1970s new arrivals began to be classified according to a modified version of the Library of Congress system. The two systems' differences reflect "competing theories of knowledge In a sense, the [old] Widener system was Aristotelian; its divisions were empirical, describing and reflecting the languages and cultural origins of books and highlighting their relations to one another in language, place, and time; [the Library of Congress system], by contrast, was Platonic, looking past the surface of language and nation to reflect the idealized, essential discipline in which each [item] might be said to belong." Because of the impracticality of reclassifying millions of books, those received before the changeover remain under their original "Widener" classifications. Thus among works on a given subject, older books will be found at one shelf location (under a "Widener" classification) and newer ones at another (under a related Library of Congress classification). In addition, an accident of the building's layout led to the development of two separate card catalogsthe "Union" catalog and the "Public" cataloghoused on different floors and having a complex interrelationship "which perplexed students and faculty alike." It was not until the 1990s that the electronic Harvard On Line Library Information System was able to completely supplant both physical catalogs.

Legend holds that to spare future Harvard men her son's fate, Eleanor Widener insisted, as a condition of her gift, that learning to swim be made a requirement for graduation from Harvard. (This requirement, the Harvard Crimson once elaborated erroneously, was "dropped in the late 1970s because it was deemed discriminatory against physically disabled students".) "Among the many myths relating to Harry Elkins Widener, this is the most prevalent", says Harvard's "Ask a Librarian" service. Though Harvard has had swimming requirements at various times (e. g. for rowers on the Charles River, or as a now defunct test for entering freshmen)
Bentinck Smith writes that "There is absolutely no evidence that [Eleanor Widener] was, as a result of the Titanic disaster, in any way responsible for [any] compulsory swimming test." Another story, holding that Eleanor Widener donated a further sum to underwrite perpetual availability of ice cream (purportedly Harry Widener's favorite dessert) in Harvard dining halls, is also without foundation. A Widener curator's compilation of "fanciful oral history" recited by student tour guides includes "Flowers mysteriously appear every morning outside the Widener Room" and "Harry used to have carnations dyed crimson to remind him of Harvard, and so his mother kept up the tradition" in the flowers displayed in the Memorial Rooms.

In H. P. Lovecraft's fictional universe Cthulhu Mythos, Widener is one of five libraries holding a 17th century edition of the Necronomicon, hidden somewhere in the stacks. Thomas Wolfe, who earned a Harvard master's degree in 1922, told Max Perkins that he spent most of his Harvard years in Widener's reading room. He wrote of "[wandering] through the stacks of that great library like some damned soul, never at restever leaping ahead from the pages I read to thoughts of those I want to read"; his alter ego Eugene Gant read with a watch in his hand, "laying waste of the shelves." Historian Barbara Tuchman considered "the single most formative experience" of her career the writing of her undergraduate thesis, for which she was "allowed to have as my own one of those little cubicles with a table under a window" in the Widener stacks, which were "my Archimedes' bathtub, my burning bush, my dish of mold where I found my personal penicillin."

Over the years, Widener has been the scene of various criminal exploits "infamous for their fecklessness and ignominity."