By Ella Jacob ‘24
Staff Writer & Copy Editor
To celebrate National Library Week and National Library Workers’ Day, literary events that take place from April 4 to April 10, let’s take a look at the history of Mount Holyoke’s Williston Memorial Library, also known as Library, Information and Technology Services, and the people who run it.
The Williston Memorial Library, named in 1917 after Asahel Lyman Williston, a trustee and treasurer of the College, has long been a studious place of comfort for many students. With a donation of $50,000 (a little under $1.5 million today) from Andrew Carnegie in 1903, the library was fully built in 1905. The interior was meant to resemble Westminster Hall, the oldest building in the British Parliament. In 1990, a 30,000-foot wing was added, with an atrium modeled after the Medici Library in Florence, Italy.
In addition to the distinctive architecture, the library’s atrium boasts American glass artist Dale Chihuly’s sculpture “Clear and Gold Tower,” a 12-foot artwork created specifically for the College. The sculpture has over 450 hand-blown glass pieces and glimmering gold leaves.
The library is home to various Mount Holyoke traditions and displays of college spirit. For example, you must walk up the staircase in the atrium that corresponds to your class year, and there is a superstition that if you don’t, you won’t graduate. Seniors have the opportunity to choose a carrel, a small cubicle that they can claim and personalize for whenever they want to work in the library. Mount Holyoke students can freely peruse the stacks, a rarity compared to other colleges that require students to order books and have someone else retrieve them. M&Cs held during first-year Orientation take place in the library. And lastly, Jorge, the infamous campus goose, is the LITS mascot.
The library would not be able to function as well as it does, acting as both an “oasis of learning,” a saying represented by the College’s seal on the stained glass window of the Reading Room, and a place of comfort for students without the help of the Mount Holyoke LITS liaisons. These people are research librarians and subject specialists that students can contact for research assistance, library instruction, help with projects or access to library resources and collections. Without them, many students would be much more stressed when completing research assignments.
The Mount Holyoke News reached out to three of these liaisons to better understand all that they do.
Beth Bidlack is the manager of Research Services who specializes in Africana studies, anthropology, gender studies, Jewish studies, music and religion. She has worked in many libraries and served on reaccreditation visiting teams. She has a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
James “Jim” Burke is a research and instruction librarian. He specializes in economics, education, English, entrepreneurship, organizations and society, mathematics and statistics, psychology and sociology.
Lastly, Leslie Fields is the head of Archives and Special Collections and specializes in archives and Mount Holyoke College history.
After completing doctoral work in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and working as a research economist at the U.N. in Switzerland, Burke taught as a visiting professor of economics at UMass Amherst while also teaching a one-semester course at Mount Holyoke.
“I was approached about a position at Mount Holyoke in the academic technology team of LITS to support the use of research data and statistical analysis tools for student and faculty research. I was intrigued by the opportunity to support a wide range of research projects and to become part of the Mount Holyoke community,” he explained. “Not long after I joined LITS in 2001, I became part of a merged team of research librarians and academic technologists. I soon became very interested in learning and teaching about the amazing breadth of library research tools available to student and faculty researchers,” Burke continued. “With professional development opportunities, curiosity and the guidance of my library colleagues, I have been able to develop an expertise in library research that has allowed me to broaden my skills in supporting researchers at Mount Holyoke.”
Bidlack shared a similar sentiment: “I love teaching and learning; being a librarian means that you’re learning new things in a variety of disciplines every day. Librarianship is a very interdisciplinary profession that requires an understanding of many different methodologies and approaches to research.”
Fields, whose work primarily centers around the Mount Holyoke Archives, also shared her story.
“I became interested in working as an archivist thanks to an assignment I had as an undergraduate. I was taking a research methods class that included a class visit to the college archives and a project with archival materials. When I started to read a diary from a student in the 1920s who lived in the same dormitory that I was living in, I was hooked. Here I was reading someone else’s diary — who knew you were allowed to do that?” she said. “And then I looked around and saw that there were people working in this space, whose job it was to work with all of these people and stories of the past, and I wanted to do that too,” concluded Fields.
As the head of Archives and Special Collections, Fields’ liaison work focuses on “introducing students to archives and archival research for the first time.” She especially enjoys when “students make a direct connection between the past and the present, and use what they learn in the Archives to engage in activism and change right now at the College and in the wider world,” she said.
Bidlack works as a liaison and manager of Research Services, where she “teach[es] class sessions on information literacy and research, provide[s] support for faculty for research assignments and course materials, consult[s] with students and select[s] materials for the library collection.”
Similar to Fields, Bidlack also enjoys connecting people to resources that can then connect them to other people. Bidlack noted that “doing research is often like working a puzzle. Both involve finding the right piece — or source — at the right time and shifting your perspective … as needed throughout the process.”
Burke emphasized that “the best part of working as a library liaison is the opportunity to learn about and discuss the research ideas and projects of faculty and students. It’s interesting and enjoyable to help them think about ways to structure their questions and get the materials or data they need to be successful. I enjoy being part of the Mount Holyoke community. It’s exciting to be part of the professional community of academic libraries across the world.”
Making things work during the pandemic has added some difficulty, but the librarians are still hard at work. “Even though we’re working remotely right now, Research Services and my LITS colleagues are here to support students,” Bidlack said.