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Since 1996, Laura Linard has served as the director of Historical Collections for Baker Library in Knowledge and Library Services at Harvard Business School. She serves on the Manuscripts and Archives Standing Committee. Linard holds a BA from Beloit College in American history and government, and she earned her MLS from Columbia University, where she was part of the rare book program. She was interviewed for Library Notes on January 4.
LN
What’s the genesis of Historical Collections in Baker Library?
LL
From its inception, the Business School has had a strong interest in business history and historical materials. HBS played a significant role in the development of the field of business history. The first dean of the School, Edwin Gay, was an economic historian, who believed that historical analysis helped inform the teaching of management. Wallace [Donham], the second dean of the School, helped to establish the Isidor Straus chair in business history in 1927.
HBS accepted its first manuscript collection in 1916—well before the campus, and Baker Library, was built in 1927. There was a manuscript and archives department in the 1930s.
The Kress Collection of Business and Economics—once known as the Kress Library of Economics, History, and Philosophy—was established in 1937. In the late ’80s, those two departments were merged to create Historical Collections.
LN
What’s the range of materials in Historical Collections?
LL
The collections literally range from the 15th century to the present day. It’s important to recall that, as part of the HBS archives, we are collecting materials that were published yesterday. Regardless of time period and format, the collections all share a focus on business and industry—both American and globally.
The scope and the depth of the collections are really incredible. HBS began collecting at a time when no other institution was interested in business records and materials. As a result, we were able to accumulate a volume of collections that really would not be possible to collect today.
The Kress Collection, a rare-book collection of economic history and philosophy, has imprints dating from the late 1400s through 1850. The collection is primarily British and European publications.
The other large book collection is the Baker “Old Class” Collection. This collection includes 300,000 volumes, with imprint dates from the 1840s to 1970, and was the first circulating book collection for Baker. The collection includes trade publications, company histories, business directories, and other corporate publications. Much of the material in the collection is very rare because it is ephemeral trade literature that very few other libraries retained. Historical Collections assumed responsibility for this collection in 2003. We call it a “medium-rare” collection because we allow browsing in the collection and the post–1930 materials can circulate.
LN
Other holdings?
LL
We have an extensive collection of American and international corporate reports—one of the largest in the world, with reports of companies going back to the 1820s.
We also have very extensive advertising ephemera collections with trade cards and trade catalogs. Many people are aware of the trade card collection because of an LDI project [http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard] several years ago.
LN
You’re increasingly recognized for your photographic holdings.
LL
Yes. We’ve tried to increase awareness of our rich photograph holdings in the past year or two. The collection includes large photographic collections such as the United Fruit Collection, which contains over 11,000 images, the Industrial Life Photograph Collection, and the Automobile Industry Photograph Collection, to name just a few. There are alsoextensive photographs within the HBS archives and within individual manuscript collections.
LN
How would you profile your users? Are their demographics changing with digital access?
LL
Researchers come from all over the world to use the collections. They are primarily faculty members and doctoral students. Usually more than half of our users in a given month are part of the Harvard University community. We work closely with the HBS faculty, particularly the business historians. Within Harvard, I’m seeing more and more undergraduates coming to the de Gaspé Beaubien Reading Room.
We’re seeing a real broadening in the research that’s done using the Historical Collections—it’s not just the subject of pure company history. There’s much more interest in small enterprises, including research about the connections between the USA and other countries such as China. Our researchers include social and cultural historians, gender historians, and scholars in the decorative arts. Researchers come from a huge variety of disciplines. [See “Recent Research in Baker’s Historical Collections”—Ed.]
As a result of our many digital products, many of our researchers are accessing collections on the web.
LN
2008 is the Business School centennial year. HBS describes the centennial in part as a means for celebrating a legacy of innovation and achievement. What’s the role of Historical Collections in celebrating that legacy?
LL
The centennial year officially began on January 1, 2008. On April 8, there is going to be a community celebration, since April 8 is the actual anniversary of the establishment of the school.
Knowledge and Library Services is leading an institutional memory program in celebration of the HBS centennial. Historical Collections is contributing to it via the institutional memory web site [http://www.hbs.edu/centennial/im], which features a portion called “Innovation and Inquiry at HBS.”
It’s a multimedia production, which includes an interactive timeline and historical images, and also video narrative by staff, faculty, students, alumni/ae, just a broad stroke of HBS community. This multimedia publication is going to be released on February 1.
In Historical Collections we’re doing four major exhibitions over the course of the year. We started early: our first centennial exhibition was in the fall.
LN
That was the HR exhibition, entitled “The Human Relations Movement: Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments”?
LL
Exactly.
LN
Your second centenary exhibition, “A ‘Daring Experiment’: Harvard and Business Education for Women, 1937–1970” is opening this month and it documents the HRPBA—the Harvard–Radcliffe Program in Business Administration. [See "A 'Daring Experiment"—Ed.] Can you put that program and that exhibition in the context of the centennial for us?
LL
Actually, the focus of the exhibition is on the establishment of business education for women at Harvard. We’re going back to 1937, with the Training Course in Personnel Administration—a certificate program that eventually was transformed into the Management Training Program, and later into the HRPBA—which continued until women became part of the MBA course. The Training Course in Personnel Administration was ’37 to ’45, and then the Management Training Program was ’46 to ’55. HRPBA was 1955 until 1964. Women first received the Harvard MBA in 1964. The name of this exhibition—“A ‘Daring Experiment’”—was a phrase coined by Fritz Roethlisberger, a faculty member at HBS and one of leaders of the Hawthorne Experiment.
We’re looking at the relationship between Radcliffe and the HBS as business education evolved at Harvard, and recording the closer and closer collaboration between the two. From the very beginning, HBS faculty were among the faculty that taught in the Radcliffe certificate program. As time progressed, the curriculum of the Management Training Program began to be modeled on the MBA curriculum.
In the fall of 1963, eight women enrolled in the MBA degree program at Harvard Business School as fully matriculated students and the “daring experiment” begun by Radcliffe College in 1937 ended. When that happened, something was lost and something was gained. What was lost was the camaraderie and the relationships that can develop in a completely female environment—as opposed to being a very small minority in the first few years at the Business School.
LN
Where are the records for the HRPBA and the two other programs: at Baker or in the Schlesinger Library?
LL
Both. Schlesinger has all the student records, and Baker Library Historical Collections has the administrative records within our faculty minutes and our deans’ records. This has been a wonderful opportunity to work closely with the staff of the Radcliffe Archives and the Schlesinger Library. They have been very generous in terms of lending pieces, identifying materials, and really helping us a lot with all aspects of the exhibition preparation. The exhibition will feature materials from both of our collections. It is basically 50–50 in terms of the extent of material coming from their collections as well as ours.
LN
The exhibition runs through . . .
LL
May 16th.
LN
The exhibition includes a companion web site. When might that be available?
LL
On January 25 at http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/daring. Over the course of the next year, we will be conducting oral histories that will be videotaped and added to the web site.
LN
Thank you.
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