regional and music research collections at lovejoy library southern illinois university at edwardsville

john c. abbott, head
special and research collections
and
john neal hoover
fine arts librarian
lovejoy library
southern illinois university at edwardsville
edwardsville, illinois

The beginnings of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville go back to the summer of 1957 when the university commenced offering classes at the former Shurtleff College site in Alton and in a converted high school building in East St. Louis. As of the fall of 1983 the student body numbered over 10,000 and the book collections nearly three-quarters of a million volumes. Located in the Metro-East portion of Greater St. Louis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville serves the second largest metropolitan region in Illinois, an area which had previously not been directly served by a public university. The university's central purpose has always been to serve a local student body and to enhance the cultural and economic life of the region. A corollary assumption is that the university's library would concentrate much of its energy on collecting regional materials reflecting the life and interests of the area.

Lovejoy Library's special collections may be described by two labels, Music Research Collections and Regional Research Collections. The latter include the University Archives, established as an effective entity in September 1979, when Allan J. McCurry was appointed University Archivist.

Building a regional research collection has been, from the early 1960s pursued as a major goal. Most of the books are dispersed by classification, by form, or by degree of rarity. Many of the manuscripts were cataloged by Milton C. Moore, Senior Cataloger/ Rare Book Librarian, and kept in the Rare Book Room. Since the 1982 appointment of John C. Abbott as Head of Special and Research Collections and the subsequent assignment of adequate quarters, most of the nonbook materials have been brought together in one service location, and collection policies and efforts have become more clearly focused.

Organizationally the Music Research Collections have been especially fortunate. Commencing about 1966, under the direction and inspiration of our first Fine Arts Librarian, Mabel Murphy, the library began to acquire, catalog, and organize for use the unusually large, diverse, and important Music Research Collections. This work, so well begun, has been carried on by Marianne Kozlowski and currently John Neal Hoover. Although primarily national and international in emphasis the Music Research Collections contain many holdings of regional significance.

The development of the Regional Research Collections and the Music Research Collections has been greatly aided by the Friends of Lovejoy Library, through whose efforts a large number of important gifts and purchases have been acquired.

Regional Research Collections

The main catalogs provide access to approximately 15,000 books and state documents pertaining to the region, substantial periodical holdings, and separate Map Collections, which include about 5,000 Illinois, Missouri, and St. Louis Metropolitan area maps. These materials, current as well as older, are as assiduously pursued as the manuscripts, archival materials, and rare items which end up in the Regional Research Collections service location. Responsibility for acquisition is shared with the several subject librarians and departments.

Three important early works on the Mississippi Valley which we own in their original editions are General Georges Collot's A Journey in North America (French ed., 1824-26), Thomas and Wild's The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated (1841-42), and Henry Lewis' Das illustrirte Mississippithal (1854-58).

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Our most intensive collecting efforts are concentrated upon materials pertaining to the immediate region, especially the "Metro-East" portion of lllinois which is largely synonymous with the service areas of the Lewis and Clark and Kaskaskia library systems. The library's collecting efforts tend to diminish with distance from the region. However, we are quite comprehensive in our collecting of state of Illinois documents, received for many years now on a depository basis through the State Library. The library retains superseded issues of U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps for lllinois and Missouri. Monographs, special studies, periodicals, and other serials which pertain to Illinois, or portions thereof, are also collected. However, unless of special significance or quality, we do not attempt to acquire local histories, county and local documents, or other material which fall outside our immediate region. The "special significance or quality" criterion is generally invoked for Illinois county histories, maps, and atlases. Thus the library recently added to its already substantial holdings the more than 350 titles in the Illinois component of Research Publications' microfilm series of county and regional histories and atlases.

We also attempt to collect the most important state and regional histories, studies, and other significant documentary material pertaining to the Mississippi Valley. The immediate area we serve has an ethnically diverse population of over 725,000 and covers over 6,000 square miles. It includes eleven counties and parts of several others, has several hundred cities, towns, and villages of various sizes, a multitude of other governmental units, probably well over a thousand community organizations, and many times that number of business enterprises. The amount of printed matter and records produced is staggering.

It is not to be supposed that the holdings of any library could begin to reflect more than a tiny portion of the life and history of such a community. Nevertheless, all our limitations being understood, we have, by hook or crook, luck, and spasmodic enterprise acquired many valuable and significant collections.

Our most important single collection undoubtedly is the research files of the late John Francis McDermott, prodigiously productive scholar in the field of Mississippi Valley culture and history and one of the founders of American Studies. He was the author or editor of three dozen books and of about one hundred and sixty articles or parts of books, most of them dealing with pioneer life and culture, from the Appalachians to the Rockies and beyond. Extensive as his writings were, the planned projects for which he had gathered materials from the libraries and archives of America and Europe could have consumed another lifetime.¹ His carefully arranged files extend to about eighty cubic feet. In addition there are several hundred copies of original documents on microfilm.

It was through the efforts of Professor McDermott that the library acquired a most important document, the unpublished, untranslated 200-page manuscript report, written in 1798 by Nicolas de Finiels, a French engineer employed by the Spanish government, describing the Mississippi Valley from New Madrid to the mouth of the Illinois. Also of the French period 1804-47, is a small collection of the papers of Pierre Menard and his partner Felix Valle.

The library has exceptional holdings pertaining to the early history of Nauvoo. Those relating to the Mormon period are described in Sources of Mormon History in Illinois, 1839-48: An Annotated Catalog of the Microfilm Collection at Southern Illinois University.² The compiler, Professor Stanley B. Kimball, was responsible for the acquisition and organization of the 103 reels of microfilmed documents which comprise the collection. For the Icarian period immediately following the Mormon era the library's collection of Etienne Cabet manuscripts, about 1,600 pages, is the most important single source in existence. In addition, a large number of pre-Nauvoo Icarian publications are held. The post-Nauvoo Icarian period is represented by a collection assembled by Professor Ernest Marchand, an Icarian descendant, consisting of about 140 letters and documents, plus a number of newspaper issues, published chiefly at Corning, Iowa.

The library's collection of Slavic and East European-Americana is among the four or five strongest of its kind in the country. As with the Mormons in the Illinois Collection, this collection was assembled to a large extent by the efforts of Professor Stanley B. Kimball, aided by the Slavic and East European Friends of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, who also provided substantial endowment funds for acquisition of supporting reference materials. The main emphasis of the collection is on publications — "imprints" — issued by the various Slavic and East European groups in the United States and Canada. Altogether there are over 3,000 titles plus approximately 90 manuscript groups, chiefly records of lodges in the region. Virtually all of these materials were gifts from persons in the region of Slavic and East European origins. Despite its national — and Canadian — scope, about half of the collection has regional importance.³

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A very different ethnic collection is that pertaining to the settling and early history of Highland, Illinois, the most important and influential nineteenth century Swiss community in the United States. Under library auspices most of the extremely rare accounts, all in German, of early Highland have been translated. Another, the Reisebericht, a travel account of the Koepfli and Suppiger families from Switzerland to New Switzerland (Highland), is being prepared for publication.⁴ Descendants of the Koepfli and Suppiger families, and others, have greatly extended our holdings of primary materials relating to nineteenth century Highland.

Not ethnic collections as such, but of considerable interest to persons studying the history of ethnic groups in St. Louis, are two large collections on soccer, one assembled by Prudencia "Pete" Garcia (4 cubic feet) and the other, substantially larger but not yet organized, created by Hap Meyer, both of St. Louis, for many years the country's chief soccer center. Valuable for the study of right-wing and isolationist movements during the 1930s and 1940s are the papers of Edward Koch, of Germantown, Illinois, the publisher of a monthly journal, The Guildsman, dedicated to the "principles of the Corporate State."

Among other collections relating to the immediate region, the most important and extensive is the Flagg family papers, centering on Gershom Flagg,⁵ who emigrated to the Edwardsville area from Vermont in 1817; his son, Willard Cutting Flagg; and Sarah Smith (Mrs. Willard C.) Flagg, the latter's diaries and letters bringing the record down to about 1905.

The city of East St. Louis is represented by extensive collections of its mayors' archives, beginning with Alvin G. Fields, 1951-1971 (ten cubic feet), and continuing with James E. Williams, 1971-1975 (seventy cubic feet), and William G. Mason, 1975-1979 (one hundred cubic feet), the latter two collections being only partially organized. These documents are admirably supplemented by the newspaper morgue of the East St. Louis Journal, known from 1964 until its demise March 15, 1979, as the Metro-East Journal. The well organized clippings in this file are a most important source of information for the whole of the Metro-East area.

Also of considerable value are the library's holding of a substantial portion of the Madison County Clerk of Circuit Court's records from 1816 to 1900. Another dimension of public service is represented in the personal files of George T. Wilkins, who spent forty-eight years in education in Illinois, including four years as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1959-1963.

Further documentation of the educational history of the region, and of the state, is contained in over five hundred cubic feet of records in the University Archives. In addition, there is the Shurtleff College Collection, chiefly publications, but also containing student record files. As a successor to Shurtleff College and its antecedent, John Mason Peck's Rock Spring Seminary, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville has some claim to continuity back to 1827.

The library has important holdings of research materials relating to coal mining in the region and beyond. The Frank Fries Collection (eleven cubic feet) consists principally of records and papers from the 1940s to 1968, documenting Fries' career as a labor arbitrator in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Utah. Also included are some records pertaining to the United Mine Workers, coal operators associations and companies, and Fries' career as a Congressman, 1937-1941, from the 21st Illinois District. Additional mining materials include eight cubic feet of records and papers of the Progressive Mine Workers of America, Local Union No. 3, Collinsville, and of four of its predecessor unions, including United Mine Workers locals from which the PMWA local split in the 1930s. The records span the period 1908-1962. Another substantial collection, still growing, consists of oral histories of about fifty persons associated with the coal mining industry, chiefly in St. Clair County. Mrs. Delta Masterson, Science Reference Librarian who is conducting the project, has also assembled a number of photographs and other documents relating to coal mining in the area. Because persons in the mines were predominantly foreign-born, these several coal mining collections are also of value for the study of ethnic groups in the region. The papers of the late Harold Gibbons, for most of his long career an influential and progressive executive of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, will, when processed, provide a further labor dimension.

A smaller collection worthy of note is the approximately twenty autograph notes and poems of Eugene Field. Also held are documents pertaining to the case of the state of Illinois versus Governor Edward Coles, who was sued for $2,000 for emancipating his slaves without giving bond that they would not become a public charge!

Although not formally under our custody, the library is the site for the permanent display of a major portion of the Richard Nickel Collection of Louis H. Sullivan Architectural Ornament, much the largest and most important such Sullivan collection in existence.

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Music Research Collections

Over the past two decades, Lovejoy Library has assembled an extensive collection of music research materials which has attracted national and international attention. These collections offer not only a wide research potential to the musicologist; their existence has broadened tremendously the variety of material available for study by the entire university community through exhibits, classroom discussion, and performances.

This collection consists of over 175,000 items, and it has enjoyed enthusiastic support from many individuals locally as well as on the national level. It was built primarily through donation. However, funds coming from the Friends of Lovejoy Library enabled the collection to grow steadily, building particular strengths in American popular music and in the Western musical tradition of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The collection is used primarily by the music faculty at SIUE, and by students in the music graduate program. It is open also for use by valid researchers not connected with the university. Undergraduates with written consent of faculty members or with permission of the fine arts librarian also have access. Use in performances, from faculty recital to local productions, has been encouraged.

The varied collection boasts not only thousands of scores and tens of thousands of historic recordings, but also player piano rolls, photographs, libretti, stage designs, sheet music, concert bills, and cinema music, as well as manuscripts of important composers, autographs, and realia such as early European and non-Western musical instruments. Other materials include song books, hymnals, radio tapes, video and audio cassettes, oral history transcripts, and printed ephemera.

The most important special collection of music in the library is the KMOX Collection. It became a cornerstone from which an active collecting program developed concentrating on musical Americana. In the early days of radio, broadcasting stations created libraries of popular musical arrangements and printed sheet music for studio bands, singers, and other performers. Such libraries grew to enormous size, and Lovejoy was fortunate to acquire the collections of one of the largest, that of St. Louis station KMOX. This collection contains approximately 50,000 titles of concert, special, and orchestral arrangements, over 30,000 pieces of popular sheet music of the thirties and forties, and thous ands of stock orchestral scores. The original card index has provided some measure of control; it continues to be a heavily used resource.

Other important collections of American music at Lovejoy include the Essex and the Colket materials. The music collection assembled by the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts, was obtained by Lovejoy in 1971. The Essex collection includes 10,000 pieces of sheet music, 500 hymnals and song books, and hundreds of concert bills, providing the Lovejoy collections with the unified music collecting record formed by an early American subscription library over a two hundred-year-period. One of the strengths of the Essex group is its 903 libretti of operas performed in the nineteenth century in America and Europe. A card index is available. The Colket Collection of American sheet music is a small, highly selective group of early items with illustrated covers.

An extensive collection of historic jazz recordings and oral history tapes of interviews with jazz musicians bolsters the American Music Collection. These recordings form the National Ragtime and Jazz Archives which contains 25,000 78 RPM discs and numerous tapes of live performances and interviews. John Randolph, Professor of Art at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, formed an important record collection obtained after his death by the library which details the early development of traditional blues and jazz. This collection includes over 9,000 recordings, Randolph's papers documenting his remarkable collecting career, and his books and discographies. A large collection of scarce jazz collectors magazines and ephemera, such as hundreds of decorative record sleeves, is included. The recordings are representative of all pre-World War II periods and styles of jazz and includes thousands of rare jug band recordings. A preservation project concentrating on cleaning discs, recording them onto archival-quality tape, and transfer of the discs into acid free sleeves is under way. A card catalog plus an inventory corresponding to standard discographies provides tentative control.

Lovejoy Library also holds many special collections illustrating the history of Western music in general. The most important of these is the Tollefsen Collection. Carl Tollefsen of Brooklyn, New York, brought together a vast collection of books, manuscripts, printed scores, photographs, and antique musical instruments in a collecting career that spanned over half a century. Highlights of the collection include an eighteenth century harpsichord, plus numerous examples of lute family instruments of the baroque era. Thirty-five hundred manuscripts penned by mastercomposers, including Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky are included. First editions of printed scores of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann are also present. The Tollefsen Collection enabled Lovejoy to build a preeminent violin collection, just as the Kiburz Collection, formed by an area family of musicians, enabled the library to form significant holdings of flute music for research and performance. These collections were supplemented by the acquisition of the Walter Damrosch scrapbooks, photographs, and autographs; and by the important Alfred R. Mohr Collection of Modern European manuscripts, autograph photos, and original stage sets. The Mohr collection includes documents for the study of twentieth century composers such as Hindemith, R. Strauss, Ravel, Kodaly, and Orff.

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Lovejoy also possesses significant holdings (ca. 5,500 pieces) of cinema music scores, including 1,500 pieces of orchestral mood music from the days of silent films. This music was owned by Elmer Booker, a musician who worked in the silent motion picture theaters in the St. Louis area.

While the Music Research Collections exist as an independent, nationally significant branch of the SIUE library's research collections, they have been tempered to reflect regional cultural achievement, and they help in the goal to provide the strongest area studies program possible. The collection now exists primarily to preserve the performing arts heritage in southwestern Illinois and the Mississippi Valley.

Control for special musical items is mainly provided by card indexes and inventories. Materials are grouped by collection, similar to standard archival organizational patterns, and an overall finding aid is available. The feasibility of an on-line project for cataloging a portion of the American sheet music, employing full bibliographic description similiar to the many descriptive points used in rare book cataloging, is being investigated. Two major exhibits are scheduled in the coming year. A primary concern which is being addressed is the ongoing need for increased security from theft or disaster and the inauguration of sound preservation and conservation policies. Due to its vast size and cohesive nature the Music Research Collections have been housed separately from the rest of the library's special collections, with only the most fragile or unique items being placed in the Rare Book Room. As problems regarding space continue to grow, a new location for the collections is being planned, which will more effectively address the aforementioned need for better security and the special concerns of the student of music.

Footnotes

1.    A bibliography of his work is contained in A Resume of the Life and Career of John Francis McDermott, 1902-1981. Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, May 13, 1981.

2.    2nd ed., revised and enlarged. The Library, Southern Illinois University. Carbondale — Edwardsville, 1966. (Bibliographic Contributions, No. 1)

3.    Slavic-American Imprints: A Classified Catalog of the Collection at Lovejoy Library . . . Edited by Stanley B. Kimball, cataloged by Rudolph Wiererand Milton Moore. Southern Illinois University, 1972, and Supplement I, 1979. (Bibliographic Contributions, Nos. 7 and 9)

4.    See John C. Abbott's "Foreword: The Pioneer Writings about Highland," in New Switzerland in Illinois. Friends of Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1977, pp xi-xiv.

5.    A large portion of Gershom Flagg's letters, 1816-1836, edited by Solon J. Buck, were published as "Pioneer Letters of Gershom Flagg," Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1910, XV, 139-183 (Springfield. 1912). A new, enlarged edition, which will incorporate correspondence of Williard Cutting Flagg to his death in 1878, is being prepared for publication by Barbara Lawrence and Nedra Branz.

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