Strengthening Modern Greek Collections

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Building U.S.-Greek Library Partnerships

Joan Grant,
Director of Collection Services
New York University, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
Modern Greek Studies Collection

Presented to the CLIR / Library of Congress Conference,
"Strengthening Modern Greek Collections," April 29-30, 1999

NYU's Modern Greek Studies collection is a very young one having begun only when The Aristotle S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies was established at the University in 1988 by John Brademas then the President, and now President Emeritus, of New York University. Up until that time while Bobst Library supported curricula in classics, history and Near East Studies there was no focus at the University on Modern Greece per se and a library collection of materials in the Modern Greek language was virtually nonexistent. Since that time a successful fund raising campaign has established endowment funds that support acquisitions, a moderate amount of retrospective collection building has been done and a program of ongoing acquisitions of contemporary publications has been set up. We are comfortably able to support the current course offerings but have a number of serious lacunae which I will describe.

It was NYU's excellent and unprecedented good fortune that the founding director of the Onassis Program, Dr. Speros Vryonis, Jr., considered building a serious research and teaching library collection to be of paramount importance to the life of the Program. I remember very well that on his very first visit to NYU when he was being recruited to head the new center, Professor Vryonis visited the library and scrutinized the catalog in order to get a sense of the resources that would be waiting for him. He met with the library administration and collection development staff soon after he assumed leadership of the program and quickly established himself as a true friend of the library. Our first challenge was to find the financial resources and the collection development expertise to begin to build Bobst's Modern Greek collection. Not unlike many university libraries, we at NYU have our budget stretched to the limit providing support for existing programs. When the curriculum moves into new areas a substantial budget infusion is necessary in order to first lay a solid foundation and then continue buying in the new field. We collaborated with Professor Vryonis to come up with a plan that served us very well for the initial years of the Program. Because the Program's endowment provided funding for several chairs that would not be filled until year four of the program, Professor Vryonis secured permission to use Program funds for library acquisitions for the first three years. He also hired Evro Layton, former collection development librarian for Harvard's Modern Greek collection, to serve as a consultant selecting Greek publications and working with Greek publishers and vendors on our behalf. Her task was to build a core collection of books in Modern Greek literature, history, society, economy and folklore. Professor Vryonis himself devoted considerable time to bringing our Byzantine collection, formerly adequate for undergraduate teaching but lacking the primary sources necessary for research, up to par. For its part the library absorbed the cost of temporary staff necessary for processing, strengthened its collecting in other European languages and agreed to work aggressively to raise funds for acquisitions and staffing.

Now more than ten years after the inception of the Onassis Program much has changed but the library continues to make steady progress. Thanks to the generosity of a number of donors, especially Vardis Vardinoyannis, John Brademas and the late Alexander Papamarkou, endowment income comfortably supports our current acquisitions program. Unfortunately, we have not yet been successful in raising money to establish an Hellenic Studies Librarian position. We remain in the difficult situation of having no one on our staff with the necessary subject and language expertise to select and process material in Modern Greek. We manage with a part-time adjunct librarian cataloger, a staff member of the New York Public Library, who does original cataloging. We employ a graduate student in the Hellenic Studies Program who searches the utilities for copy and does copy cataloging . The graduate student also works in the Collection Services office where she processes new shipments of receipts from our book dealer in Athens. For selection we rely very heavily on the faculty who give generously of their time to review approval plan shipments and make other purchase recommendations.

A mainstay of our acquisitions program has been an approval plan established with OIONOS in Athens in 1994. Our profile covers works of academic or research value published in Greece in Greek or English related to the post-classical period. Subjects covered include Greek language and literature; linguistics and philology; performing arts; history of Greece; social sciences (politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology); philosophy; religion; and women's studies. Our faculty has been very pleased with the selections and the dealer has been most accommodating in preparing invoices and shipments that can be handled with relative ease by our non-Greek speaking staff. OIONOS also handles our subscriptions to periodicals published in Greece - about 90 titles.

The faculty has grown to five full-time positions including the director of the Program who is also chair of the Classics Department. Other appointments are in comparative literature, politics and history - Byzantine and modern. Recuritment is underway for sixth position, an anthropologist. The Program is slowly building its cadre of graduate students and the undergraduate program is attracting a growing enrollment. A proposal for an undergraduate major is in preparation and will require intermediate level Greek for its three tracks which will include literature and culture; politics and society; and dialog with classical culture. An NYU summer program in Greece is also popular and it is expected that the undergraduate major will grow as a result of interest piqued in the summer session. Also in discussion is a Master's Program in Hellenic Studies.

Our principal interests in collection development with potential for cooperative efforts are to acquire or have access to an increased number of nineteenth and twentieth century journals and newspapers. Material related to post-World War II politics is of great interest as is access to finding aids of archival collections in Greek repositories. We would like to fill in gaps in our holdings of twentieth century monographs and hope to identify appropriate collections offered for sale. We are eager to work with our colleagues in this country and in Greece to explore the potential for cooperation and thank the Library of Congress and Council on Library and Information Resources for giving us the opportunity to begin these discussions.