College library rankings

joelangford
Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:36:36 +0000

I had no idea of the richness of the Texas collection. Thanks, JST86, for a superb rundown of the treasures held in Austin. The New Yorker article was very interesting. To the person who argues that Yale and Harvard are better, it depends on what you are measuring. Harvard obviously has the most volumes outside the LOC, so you are likely to get anything you could possibly want there. But, since these huge collections are being digitilized anyway, we will one day all be able to access them. In fact, I suppose we already can with interlibrary loan. UT’s collection doesn’t interest you any more than a museum would, but, to scholars needing to study the original manuscript, I suppose UT is a museum of world literature, something that can’t be easily digitalized.

Obviously, HYP and other schools have the resources to compete for these manuscripts, but it seems they haven’t chosen to allocate their resources that way. I think I have read that the Beinecke collection at Yale is stronger than UT in 18th and 19th century manuscripts. It sounds like some people with a great deal of foresight and savvy put something together at Texas which is now quite special and impossible to duplicate.