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Interview with Alfred Willis: Reflections of an Avant-Garde Librarian

by Nader Vossoughian

In the interview that follows, Willis discusses a range of issues and projects: among other things, Architronic, a web-based journal of architecture (arguably the world’s first web-based journal of architecture), which he started in 1993; his thoughts about libraries and their role in our information-intensive Age; his views about Paul Otlet, the visionary Belgian information theorist of the early 20th century.

Q. Most of my readers won't know much about you. What’s your background? Tell me something about how you were trained. Are you a librarian by training? Aren’t you also an architect?

A. I grew up in a small town in south Georgia and became interested in architecture as a child. After high school, I went to Clemson University to study architecture in a so-called "4+2" program, earning a Bachelor degree in 1976 and opting not to continue for the Master of Architecture. Clemson's program when I got there was very much focused on training people for practice. In my second and third year, I became increasingly interested in architectural history, and this interest deepened in my fourth year when I especially enjoyed Wayne Drummond's theory class and a seminar on Modernism offered by the Dean, Harlan McClure. I had by then started doing a lot of reading outside the curriculum, and was especially impressed by the writings of Robert Venturi (who was not considered, at that time at Clemson, the right sort of influence on a student architect.), the Smithsons, and Charles Jencks. I produced what I think was a fairly strong -- certainly conceptually strong -- body of design work in fourth year; it was quite controversial among the faculty (my final project stumped the panel by receiving one each of the grades A, B, C, and F, as well as a "no comment") and raised a lot of questions among my fellow students. I had a lot of fun in fourth year, but at the same time I became less and less interested in pursuing further education in design.

I decided I wanted to study architectural history at Columbia, where the main attraction was the Avery Library; I didn't really know much about the faculty or the specific research opportunities available there. In late 1975, I think it was, I traveled to New York to talk with James Beck (then chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology) about my prospects at Columbia. He advised me to try to do some more coursework in art history proper before starting the graduate work I was contemplating. I took his advice by spending two years at the University of Brussels (ULB). Brussels was a place I had especially liked during a summer trip to Europe in 1973. As a student there, I cultivated an interest in Belgian art and architecture, and first heard of Paul Otlet. I finally enrolled at Columbia in the Fall of 1978, and finished my PhD there under George Collins. He and I discussed something like fifteen possible dissertation topics, and we finally settled on "Flemish Renaissance Revival in Belgian Architecture, 1830-1930." He thought it was the one easiest to fund (and he was right), plus I think he found it the most baffling. The topic allowed me to return to Belgium for another three years, which I enjoyed, but (as I realized even before I started it) it was not a topic that made the prospect of getting on a tenure track at all likely. I didn't mind, though, because even before undertaking the dissertation I had already more or less decided I wanted to be a librarian. George Collins was not very happy about my shift in interest, and he had me over to his apartment one evening to receive a stern talk from his wife, Christiane (who was a librarian and also an architectural historian) on the errors in my thinking. The talk didn't change my mind; it just made me like and respect both George and Christiane all the more for being so concerned about me. Many people have assumed that it was simply using the Avery Library that got me interested in librarianship. Actually, the big influence was two librarians at Columbia: one of them, Sha Fagan, was acting Avery Librarian for a while after Adolf Placzek retired; the other was a reference librarian in Butler whose name I never learned. Both of them seemed to find a joy in their work that seemed to exceed that experienced by any of the teaching academics I knew; plus the work itself seemed to be of unquestionably permanent value, and hence apparently very rewarding work. I had a number of long and increasingly fascinating chats with Sha and also with Bill O'Malley (another librarian at Avery) on the problems of information management, indexing, rare books, and other such topics. Sha and Bill made me see librarianship as a crucial and basic part of the production of architecture, art history, architectural history; something without which the success of those enterprises would seem improbable.

Eventually, I decided to study librarianship at the University of Chicago, and earned by M.A. in library science there. What was remarkable about the University of Chicago program was that it was deeply intellectual, focused on the theoretical underpinnings of library and information management; it was in no sense a "job training" program as many programs in library science were reputed to be. It was a very rigorous and challenging program. By an accident of fate, the Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Chicago when I was there was Boyd Rayward. Rayward is the great expert on Paul Otlet. I read his book on Otlet, but I never had any conversation with him about Otlet. In retrospect, my failure to engage him on the subject is completely inexplicable. Since finishing at Chicago, I have worked as a librarian, with some teaching and research in architectural history on the side. I never became an architect, and worked in architectural offices only during my student days in the summers of 1974 and 1976.

As I write this it occurs to me that I may never have strayed as far from my original interests as the circumstances described might suggest: as architecture is concerned with the organization of space, art history deals with the organization of images or artifacts, and librarianship deals with the organization of knowledge. What I like to do is to organize things, and to think about different ways organization can manifest itself.

Q. What are some of the trends you see in library management? How do you see the library being transformed in the years to come?

A. There has been a very clear trend, over the past decade or so, toward emphasizing public services in libraries and organizing them along lines more typical of retail establishments than of traditionally non-profit libraries. This trend has accompanied a decline in the relative prestige of technical services, principally cataloging and indexing. At the same time, fewer and fewer librarians seem to have a commitment to operating in accordance with the principles of library science (also known as library economy), which has cataloging and indexing at its theoretical core. The old guiding principle in libraries, of "having what patrons need, when they need it" fell by the wayside so long ago that it is only remembered as a quaint relic, if at all. Exaggerating slightly, I might say that it hardly matters any more what library users need, so long as we librarians can get them access to what they want. And when push comes to shove in the typical library of to, even the currently sacred cow of "access" is happily sacrificed upon the altar of "convenience" (meaning whatever seems to make the "customer" happy). This latter approach stakes no claim in library science but rather borrows practices eclectically from those of marketing, negotiation, public relations, and (last but not least) a misunderstanding of just-in-time production management.

There is much hand-wringing these days over the budget crisis in libraries. There seems never to be enough money to buy all the books and journals one wants (or thinks one needs). This situation is likely due, in many cases, to declining library budgets measured in constant currency. But it is also due to a shifting of funds from capital expenditures to overhead – for example, instead of buying books, leasing access to databases or paying for interlibrary loan; and in the labor lines themselves, shifting the focus from cataloging personnel (whose work can be easily “outsourced”) to public-service personnel and cadres of computer technicians. The number of libraries that can legitimately claim to be "research libraries," is declining even as the number of libraries offering access to (often vast and numerous) databases increases. When I find myself confronted by a student who has found in some database upwards of 3000 citations to articles on a particular topic, none of which can be found in my library, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But I do know that I am dealing with an unbalanced situation, one that could never have emerged had the principles of classical library science been followed. Or if even basic principles of management had been followed, for that matter.

As an organization, the typical library is increasingly devoted to mediating access to digital information. As collections of printed materials, many are shrinking: not just growing more slowly, but actually shrinking as large fractions of their holdings are moved to "offsite storage." These two trends together have given rise to a certain degree of anxiety about "the library as place." Not only librarians, but some architects and even users worry about this question. If you don't need to go to the library any more to consult (or retrieve) books, why do you need to go at all? Why not just access the library's databases and e-books, and any number of websites, from your home or office? If you need to interface with a librarian, why not use the phone or e-mail or a chat program? If you need to study with friends, why not do that in your living room? If you need to learn how to use your PC, why not take an internet-based tutorial? If you want to check out a video, why not go to Blockbuster? It is, in fact, hard to think of any such traditional library function that is unique to the library any more (other than perhaps consulting rare books). So the library seems to be becoming either a virtual place, or an irrelevant place. Or, indeed, a place to have coffee...

Q. One of the things I've observed is that libraries serve much more hybridized needs. The phenomena current at chain book sellers like Barnes and Noble, where you page through your favorite title or magazine while sipping a cappuccino, seems to have caught on at Columbia University. In Butler Library, for example, there's a snack bar that seems to be taking over the library environment. Rules against food and drink consumption in the stacks and reference rooms are not being enforced. At the same time, most people are using the library to do anything but read and research books (work stations have become meccas for on-line shopping and checking e-mail). Any thoughts?

A. I don't want to comment specifically about Butler Library, beyond mentioning that from its very beginnings it has always been an outstanding exemplar of ideas in library architecture. Practically all of the important 20th-century trends in library design are exemplified in the history of that building, from its self-supporting stacks to its (original) reference room with its built-in reference desk, its incorporation of computing equipment, and finally its coffee shop.

There is nothing morally wrong about eating and drinking in a library; it's just a dumb thing to do if you care about the integrity of paper-based materials. Spills from liquids, drippings from pieces of fruit, crumbs from pastries or chocolate bars can damage books. Nobody who cares seriously about his or her own books is going to eat and drink over them; the risk of damage is just too great. Eating and drinking in a library thus signals a contempt for the printed page specifically, and for common property in general.

The now fairly widespread toleration of eating and drinking in libraries might be seen as a relic of the permissive seventies. The installation of coffee bars in academic and public libraries, which was a fad of the 1990s that seems to have subsided somewhat, is perhaps best interpreted as an index of the crisis of the contemporary library's purpose: the crisis summed up in the question of "the library as place." When once upon a time there was a general consensus regarding what a library was for (storing books, doing research, having community meetings, etc.), the physical library was a place with a very specific meaning that all its users understood. Then over the 1990s the purpose or "place" of the (physical) library became increasingly unclear. (This was due in part to the development of the internet but also to a shift in perspective within librarianship itself that sees the library as a player in some “information industry” rather than a part of a community’s infrastructure.) “Library managers” -- tellingly, no longer "librarians" -- began casting about for new things to do with their spaces and new ways to market their institutions. Coffee bars were an easy choice, as they drew people (not readers, but now “customers”) into the facility (which is exactly why Barnes & Noble installed them), and generated activity -- the impression that something was "happening" inside the library. Something is indeed happening in these coffee bars -- people are quenching their thirst for caffeine. But what about their thirst for knowledge? Coffee can't quench that.

Alongside the coffee bar, in many libraries there is a cluster of internet workstations, where people are shopping online as much as they are conducting research via the internet. They are also playing computer games. Just the other day in my local public library, I overheard a woman complaining that she couldn't concentrate on her internet research because of the noise generated by the internet game the kid next to her was playing (guess who had to leave?). So the library-as-coffee-bar is also the library-as-shopping-center and the library-as-game-room. In short, as the library-as-library recedes into memory as an institution and disappears from real space as a specifically functioning structure, we are left with a trope, the library-as-something-else – seemingly, as-anything-else. In the mid-1990s I, along with thousands of other librarians across the country, was treated to a teleseminar whose leitmotif was the library-as-Taco-Bell (I kid you not). Meanwhile, out in cyberspace looms another and perhaps more troubling trope, the internet-as-library.

Q. What can you say more about your research interests, particularly with respect to library science and architecture? What have you been working on over the last decade? Have you been carrying out any research projects that you'd like to share?

A. In library science, I have been interested in intellectual access to imagery, the structure of the architectural literature, and aspects of library management. I am pleased to have published one article, co-authored with Gene Matysek, that had a fairly significant impact on discussions within the library profession. That was "Place and Functionality of Reference Services from the Perspective of Total Quality Management Theory," which appeared in the e-journal, LIBRES, in August 1992. That publication showed me, literally from one day to the next, the true power of internet distribution and its promise for scholarship, since almost instantly I started receiving e-mailed reactions to the article.

In recent years, I have also been working on aspects of architecture in southern California and southern Georgia. My work on the Los Angeles construction company, Meyer & Holler, has led to ongoing research on early 20th-century design-build practice. About once a month or so, I have been going to south Georgia, assembling photographs and other documentation of an extensive body of work providing a superb example of how modernism got from places like the Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard Graduate School of Design to tiny towns in the American hinterlands. I like to work on unlikely topics like these. It's a legacy I learned from my graduate school advisor George Collins, who was wonderful in encouraging his students to look beyond the obvious or fashionable topics of the day -- far, far beyond them, in fact! -- to find opportunities for expanding the knowledge base of architectural history at the most fundamental level.

Q. Tell me about Architronic. How did it start? What was the climate like vis-à-vis the internet?

A. When Architronic was started, the internet was not exactly new, but it was not something practically everybody knew about and used on the almost casual basis typical of today. I had learned a little bit about the internet in library school, but in the mid-1980s its applications to librarianship were not very obvious. Even e-mail seemed then to be something of limited usefulness. The first person who ever spoke to me about e-mail as something of fundamental importance to libraries and librarians was Angela Giral, the Avery Librarian at Columbia. Her words made such an impression on me I can quote them. "Get an e-mail account," she insisted. "It will change your life." At the time of that conversation with Angela, I was working as the architecture librarian at Kent State University. One of my colleagues there was Diane Kovacs, who in 1990 started the pioneering electronic journal, LIBRES, which still exists today. I told Diane what Angela had told me; she agreed completely, got me set up with an e-mail account, and taught me the basics of using e-mail.

During the time I was at Kent, the Director of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design there was Jim Dalton. Jim had been one of my teachers at Clemson University, where I studied as an undergraduate. Around the same time, as I was getting used to e-mail and exploring LIBRES, Jim asked me to chair a committee he appointed to explore the feasibility of starting an architectural journal at Kent. Before the committee ever met, Jim and I agreed on two basic points: (1) any proposed journal should be something other than a mere chronicle or showcase of architectural work produced at Kent, and (2) it should either be a genuinely unique contribution to the architectural literature, or not published at all. Practically every school of architecture at the time seemed to have a journal, and you could hardly tell one from the other; we saw no reason to add to the glut. The "journal committee" met a few times, and discussed various options for the focus of the proposed journal (theory? design? urban studies? history?), none of which seemed very original or unique. We also discussed possible budgets, all of which seemed to us to exceed the resources that would likely be available for a journal. The single biggest out-of-pocket expense was clearly printing. Because we figured any architecture journal would have to be illustrated, none of us on the committee could conceive of any way of getting around the printing problem.

The idea of Architronic came to me as a pair of realizations that flashed into my head simultaneously. First, an architectural journal did not have to have illustrations (and in fact, eschewing illustrations to concentrate on discourse might even constitute the uniqueness Jim and I sought). Second, without illustrations, it could be distributed by e-mail just like LIBRES. A third realization came slightly later: that in publishing what I am pretty sure was the world's first electronic journal in architecture, we at Kent would be carrying on an experiment and the resulting journal would be ipso facto a distinctive contribution to the architectural literature.

It turned out to be fairly easy to sell my fellow committee members on the concept, since only one of them (I think) even had e-mail at the time and therefore nobody had any real idea of what a challenge we were setting for ourselves! We quickly put together a formal proposal for Jim, who greeted it with immediate and unreserved enthusiasm. With the advice of Diane Kovacs, I developed a production plan for the first issue, which began with a lesson in e-mail for all the members of the journal committee who chose to continue now as members of Architronic's founding editorial board. We discretely contacted a number of writers and solicited contributions. It seemed to me that we got the most enthusiastic responses from people who knew the least about the internet. In any event, we got plenty of material, and the inaugural issue turned out to be enormous. It had no illustrations, to be sure, but it had a lot of text.

The first issue came out in December 1992. The editorial board decided that each issue should have some innovation, so that Architronic remained genuinely experimental. The second issue "contained" graphics (an architectural drawing and a musical score) retrievable by file transfer protocol (downloading off of an on-line server). The third issue, a showcase of student writing, was the first to have graphics and text distributed integrally in a single article. That was possible because Architronic then took advantage of the possibilities Mosaic offered for browsing the nascent World Wide Web. The fourth issue, distributed in May 1994, included moving pictures. It also included an article by Jeanne Brown on what was then a topic of great novelty: "internet resources" for the study of architecture (which had multiplied as a result of the implementation of Gopher retrieval).

Q. Who conceived of Architronic anyway? Who's idea was it?

A. I'll take credit for conceiving of Architronic as an electronic journal. But the idea of the journal as such, and the sort of journal it became, was the collective product of its initial editorial board. Jim Dalton and Diane Kovacs played major roles in inspiring it. Other people who contributed very heavily to the conceptualization and practical realization of Architronic in the earliest stages included Elwin Robison, Charles Graves, and Jeanine Centuori. Graduate student Bill Lucak is the person whose technical expertise made it possible to create Architronic in the first place and continue to improve it over the years.

Q. How was Architronic received when it first came out (see http://architronic.saed.kent.edu)? Did you also publish a hardcopy version? How did you distribute it?

A. The first issue of Architronic was received as an unpleasant surprise by most of those who got it. We made a serious mistake in distributing this issue. We had decided to distribute it in the manner LIBRES had been distributed: each article as a separate e-mail and all the articles e-mail ed to all recipients in quick succession. The members of the editorial board compiled a list of the e-mail addresses of everyone we knew who had e-mail at the time (it was not all that many people, and most of them were librarians). The e-mailing happened overnight. We figured that the next morning all our friends would be astounded. They were astounded all right, but they were also dismayed, and a few were downright angry.

The distribution strategy we used had worked for LIBRES because each issue of that journal was relatively small, and the articles it contained relatively short. The first issue of Architronic, however, was very large and many of the articles were quite long. The result was that Architronic's first issue overloaded the e-mail boxes of most recipients. At Columbia University, where several people were on the distribution list, the result of our surprise distribution was (I was told) a crash of the e-mail server. We never again distributed Architronic in the same way, which is to say, as spam. Horrors! When the second issue was ready, we merely sent out instructions on how to retrieve it by file transfer protocol. Much better!

Architronic never appeared in hardcopy. It was designed to be a purely electronic product. Nevertheless, on the first day of distribution of each new issue, we printed out two hardcopies for archival purposes. One of these was routed to the Kent State University archives, and the other was bound and placed on the shelves of the Architecture Library there. It is possible that librarians elsewhere bound similarly produced printouts.

A "commemorative" edition of the first year's issues was produced on diskette, and given to members of the editorial board. I don't suppose that any of those disks could be read any more, even if anybody still has one!

As time went on, and the World Wide Web became more robust, previous issues of Architronic were reformatted to remain both easily retrievable and intelligible. I recently noticed that MIT is still providing access to the contents of the early issues of Architronic in the form in which they were originally distributed at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/dept/libdata/applications/ejournals/a/a-m/Architronic/top.html.

Q. I've also noticed that Architronic is listed in the Avery Index. How did that come about? Was it difficult to get them to include you?

A. Despite being unhappy about having her e-mail system crash, Angela Giral at Avery recognized immediately the importance of Architronic as an experiment and catalyst of further experimentation in the realm of architectural librarianship. She and I spoke about it on the phone (I suppose the only alternative after what I had done to her e-mail!) within the first several days of the initial distribution. Soon after that, I came to New York and added Architronic as an "agenda item" to the social call I had gotten in the habit of paying Angela whenever I was in town. I didn't have to sell her on the idea of indexing Architronic. As soon as I started to bring up the subject, she completed my sentence. "And of course Avery will index it," she said in the peculiarly matter-of-fact way that I have ever since regarded as a mark of the true visionary. She set up a meeting with Ted Goodman, the librarian in charge of the Avery Index, and we worked out the details. Ted had the idea of having Architronic include with each article the instructions for retrieving it, so that his indexers could merely quote them. This was a brilliantly simple solution.

Q. How did you first get interested in Paul Otlet? How were you first introduced to his work?

A. While studying at the University of Brussels, in the Spring of 1977, I was assigned to do a seminar paper on a picture by Jean Delville that had formerly hung in the Mundaneum. So it was in researching the provenance of this picture that I first heard of the Mundaneum, and in researching the Mundaneum of course I immediately learned about Paul Otlet. I started this research at the Mundaneum itself, which at the time was located in rather dreary and cramped quarters on the outskirts of Brussels, but a shadow of its former self as a "World Center." The place was packed with stuff -- documents, works of art, furniture, filing cabinets, and a huge card catalog from which amazingly detailed bits of data could be effortlessly plucked. To this day, I have never been so impressed by an index as I was by the Mundaneum's card file. As my main interest was in the Mundaneum itself, and how the Delville painting had fit into its collections in the 1920s, I did not pay much attention to the personality of Otlet at first. But in due course of this research, I came to realize how interested Otlet had been in architecture and how important he had been as a patron, notably of Le Corbusier but also of a number of other architects.

I did most of my reading on Otlet, and of his writings, after I got to Columbia. One of the possible dissertation topics that I explored with George Collins had to do with the notion of centering in Modern architecture. The article I eventually published in Modulus on Le Corbusier's Mundaneum project was a sort of sample chapter for a dissertation along those lines, one that George and I discussed at some length before rejecting the topic for several reasons. I spent several weeks in Belgium one summer doing the reading for that chapter or article at the Albertine Library.

There I discovered that Otlet had not only published serious articles in serious journals of his time; he also self-published a number of fairly voluminous compendia of his ideas. He expressed his ideas in a rich mix of pictures and text, here and there repeated with variations, all mixed together, so their effect at once recalls medieval manuscripts and looks forward to late 20th-century mixed-media WebPages. These "books" at first glance seem rather crazy and naive, but in the same way that Buckminster Fuller's early 4D publications seem crazy and naive. They seem crazy and naive because they are so visionary, because they are so insistent on pushing the limits not only of what it is possible to do (politically, biblio-economically, architecturally, etc.) but moreover of what it is possible to think. It is very clear from these "books" that Otlet was not a very talented draftsman, yet he realized that imagery (especially diagrams) was the best, or even only, way to communicate his notions.

Otlet was very concerned with the flow of information through space, and in how information-bearing documents can be organized in space, and ultimately in how an "information space" might be ideally configured. In Le Corbusier's Mundaneum project we got a practical example how such a space might be framed concretely. It is obviously a very mystical sort of space, perhaps the first example in Le Corbusier's work of what he later called an "l'espace indicible," a space that communicates something that words cannot much as Otlet's diagrams desperately tried to communicate concepts about space and information that textual discourse failed to convey.

Q. Are there connections between your research on Otlet (which you published in 1980-1981) and the subsequent work you did on Architronic?

A. I never made any conscious connection between what Otlet did and what we did with Architronic. In retrospect, I can see that Architronic was an experiment in distributing information across space, and in creating a space out of information itself, that does have parallels with what Otlet was trying to do in the early 20th century.

Q. What about the preservation of digital documents? Do you have any thoughts about that?

A. I don't think anyone in the library world seriously believes that today's digital files are likely to survive as such over the long haul. Preservation, if it means anything, means keeping something in a form that is both resistant to degradation and suitable for reading / viewing with little or no technical apparatus. Nothing involving a computer fits that bill, for the simple reason that a computer is involved.

There are a lot of archivists involved in trying to work out strategies for extending the usefulness / retrievability of digitized information; there is a big literature by now of that subject. I have not really kept up with that literature. I think the general thinking is that what one would have to do is to refresh the digital files from time to time and (a) make them compatible with evolving retrieval/display software, plus (b) make sure they are stored on an up-to-date medium.

Q. Let’s talk about research databases. Since you’re an architectural historian by training, I suspect you know a lot about databases relating to that particular subjects. What’s your opinion, for example, of the Avery database? What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? Are there other academic databases you use in conducting architectural research?

A. Because the periodical literature in architecture is highly dispersed, articles on architectural topics can be found in practically all of the periodical indexes. The Avery Index is one of the two major ones, however. The second is the RIBA's index, now integrated with the catalog of the British Architectural Library. It may be searched free of charge at: http://www.architecture.com/go/Architecture/Reference/Library_897.html My impression of the Avery Index is that it has better coverage of American topics, and the RIBA’s index may have better coverage of European topics; but both are such large indexes that coverage of all topics would be considered "heavy." I think that there may be a perception out there that the Avery Index is of special interest to architectural historians, and might differ from the (more professionally oriented?) RIBA's index in that regard; but personally I think both indexes have an equally strong appeal to architects as well as to architectural historians. From speaking to librarians on both sides of the Atlantic, I have learned that American librarians tend to think of the Avery Index as the indispensable one, while British librarians often think that _both_ are indispensable. The truth is that they complement each other, and any architectural researcher wanting to do a comprehensive or exhaustive search of a topic _must_ use both. Both the Avery and the RIBA indexes have the same strengths: (1) their breadth of coverage and (2) the great care taken in their construction. They are both very large, very well constructed, very carefully produced indexes. One of the best things that has happened with the Avery Index in recent years has been a program of retrospective indexing to provide indexing of journals or years not covered in earlier years of its development. The only "weakness" of the Avery Index seems to be its cost: not everybody who "needs" to use it can afford to (i.e., is affiliated with an institution who can afford to subscribe to it).

I am not sure that I understand the last part of your question. For one thing I don't think that there is any one feeling that academics have about what architectural history is concerned with; there is a range of perspectives. The relative value that different architectural historians might place on the Avery Index will be a function of their particular research topics or viewpoints. For example, somebody interested in (say) the Beaux-Arts architecture of New York City around 1900 would probably find the Avery Index more useful than somebody else looking into (say) homebuilding in Arizona in the 1920s. But as new research gets published, the Avery indexes it, and the viewpoints supported by the Index (along with its subject scope) keep increasing. So I don't see the Avery (or any) Index as merely a tool for finding literature but rather as an organic part of the literature, growing and changing as the literature itself does. One might say an index is necessarily a subjective representation of the indexed literature because it arises from within that literature rather than from outside it, abstracting and re-arranging that literature in accordance with the limits of the literature itself. So to look at the Avery Index is to see how the architectural literature portrays itself to its readers. If the resulting portrayal (in plain language, the content of the Avery Index) seems biased toward conservative viewpoints and northeastern (or "established") American writers and subjects -- and I think that is less the case now that it may have been some decades ago -- it is only because the architectural literature itself has been for most of its history notoriously conservative and in the US concentrated in northeastern centers of production. It has never been because of any systematic bias in the Avery’s indexing itself.

I might close by noting that, as inspection of the footnotes to almost any article in architectural history will reveal, the literary raw material of architectural history extends far beyond the literature of architecture proper. To do architectural history requires not just access to what the Avery or the RIBA indexes, but exploration of many other indexes as well (Art Index, Engineering Index, Reader's Guide, Lexis/Nexis, etc.).

Alfred Willis is Assistant Director for Collection Development, Harvey Library, Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia.

Interview with Thomas W. Laqueur: Discussing Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003)

by Nader Vossoughian

Q. Professor Laqueur, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about the relationship between masturbation and the imagination. You discuss, for example, how the late-eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant quite forcefully condemned masturbation. By the same token, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant celebrated the imagination as a faculty of the mind that allowed humans to appreciate aesthetic beauty. Disinterested pleasure, Kant reasoned, resulted from "free play" between the intellect and the imagination -- that beauty, in other words, was a solitary experience detached from the world at large. Could Kant, after all is said and done, in any ways be seen as a repressed apologist of masturbation? Isn't self-pleasure the only form of sexual pleasure that Kant's subjectivist philosophy allows for?

A. The problem is not that the imagination is denied its rightful place by Kant. Quite on the contrary, as you point out. The point is that the evil use of the imagination places one in an untenable relationship not to something abstract like beauty but to oneself. In the case of sexual pleasure between people-- not shared but dependent on another-- he makes an elaborate argument that this is justified by the contract of marriage that gives each partner his/her due. In the case of masturbation, no such contract is possible; one is simply using oneself as an object and is leading oneself into this situation willfully.

Q. In your book, I really appreciated the way you explored how masturbation has entered into late 20th century conversations about feminism, women’s sexuality, gay pride, and lesbian studies. One issue I continue to ponder, however, is the degree to which masturbation advocates of recent years have been able to advance their agenda independent of other minority sexual rights movements. Is there, for example, a pro-masturbation lobby in Washington, D.C. (one that does not operate under the banner of a gay rights movement)? What efforts have been made to organize such a lobby, if at all (both in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere)? Has there been an upswing in masturbation rights activity since President Clinton’s dismissal of Jocelyn Elders, the former Surgeon General who was criticized for speaking about the public health benefits of masturbation?

A. The answer to this question is in one sense easy in that the State makes no claim on what a person does alone, which is still how masturbation is understood. There are no laws against it; there are no laws, as far as I know, against group masturbation; and there are no laws against mutual masturbation, because even in older Roman Catholic thinking on the subject it is not a form of sodomy. The only place where the State directly confronts masturbation is in its attacks on what it takes to be violations of public morality: mutual masturbation in rest rooms, public indecency, pedophilia, etc. In that sense, the defense of masturbation is intimately tied in with gay rights issues or the advocacy of child love, a position that finds little public voice these days. So there is no masturbation rights movement because the practice does not [run under the rubric of being] "civil" in the sense of "civil rights."

That said, there is a growing community of men and women who promote masturbatory sexuality as part of a more general liberatory program that is independent of the gay or the feminist movements. Clearly, the advocates of Tantric masturbation or of masturbation as a form of knowing oneself -- see Joanni Blank's Collection First Person Sexual example-- would fall into this category. National Masturbation Month -- the promotion of masturbation as pleasurable without any real programmatic interest -- would be another example of public advocacy of solitary sex.

Q. What can you say about the state of masturbation research in the academy? Do you foresee masturbation studies becoming as ubiquitous as gay or feminist studies? Why or why not?

A. I do not see masturbation studies becoming anything like gay and feminist studies for two reasons: it is too general a practice to create an identity, and it is outside the public domain in which areas of academic study are grounded. That said, there is a huge literature in medicine, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines that deals with one aspect or another of masturbation.

Thomas W. Laqueur is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.