LIBRARY NOTES
Visitors Committee
Sunday, June 1, 1997
One of the most successful programs of the Library has evolved from the Visitors' Committee and its efforts to assess the Library's collections in various subjects. Members volunteer to "visit" and evaluate those sections in which they have expertise. Some 30 reports, bound in a loose-leaf notebook, are available for the asking at the Main Desk. The reports range widely, from urban politics and planning, German historiography, and the theatre to Islamic science, World War I, and the decorative arts. These Visitors' reports are essential to the vitality of the Library, and additional volunteers with areas of special knowledge are always welcome.
We are seeking a new series of reports based on travel and the companion world of literature. Many travelers choose a destination because of correspondents and historians like Harrison Salisbury and Barbara Tuchman, or the journals of nineteenth-century explorers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley in Africa. They may be haunted by fictional memory - of Paris as captured by Marcel Proust or of St. Petersburg and Moscow evoked by Leo Tolstoy or Boris Pasternak. These distinctive Baedekers will draw on Visitors' knowledge of specific places and will serve as travelers' guides with reference to Library books to be read before and during a trip.
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