My local branch doesn’t have any but say I were to go to NYC or London, would I be able to have a gander at the old tomes without credentials or references? Personally I think it would be an awesome way to spend a day or two of vacation time. Is a burning curiosity and reverence for the written word enough?
While the requirement for “justification” varies from library to library, I can tell you that almost any library would want to know what materials you wanted access to beforehand, and restrict you to them. Browsing through the rare books in general is unlikely, if only because most collections would be kept in closed stacks, not out in the open, even in the rare book room itself.
The short answer is ‘no, but perhaps yes’. They expect you to have a reason to want to handle what are easily-damaged and sometimes irreplaceable objects. The same as a museum isn’t going to let anybody handle their Roman coins. If you have a good reason to see something, they’re likely to be co-operative.
For example, here’s the British Library’s reader admisisons page.
I applied for several levels of certification at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, and it was a little bit of a hurdle, but extremely fair and streamlined. Perhaps your best bet would be to establish a backstory for yourself as an independent researcher, including possible article or book titles for projected works. Competent librarians with knowledge of specific subjects will likely be able to tell the difference between someone who would like to flip through Proust’s non-digitized manuscripts, just because they’re smart or whatever excuses people give, and one who seeks less valuable, but equally specialized, access to small-run monographs and such.
Most major libraries have quite good websites which should provide detailed requirements for access.
Oh, a further point regarding smaller libraries - they’re sometimes just overjoyed to have an interested person! I’ve even encountered this in a fairly-major library, which happens to have one music manuscript I was interested in. From their reaction (via my cousin translating), it seemed I was the only person for a long time that had asked to see the volume. That it had been reproduced in facsimile and this was available in any decent research library had missed them entirely. They apparently just assumed I was the one person that decade who wanted to see their 16th-century book.
I think I let them down a bit by spending only a couple of hours with it, confirming there was nothing to glean from the original that wasn’t obvious from the facsimile (without major dismantling!). Faux pas, indeed. I also had a duty to meet people for food - why else do you find a reason to go to Italy? 
Thanks for the link GorillaMan . I was always envious of my grad student friends and their research access. I certainly appreciate the need to keep the greasy paws of the hoi poloi off the books but at the same time…damn I’d love a peek at Darwin’s notes or whatever. I think I’d go the route jacksprat suggests (were I to actually do this) I have done freelance writing before so it could make an interesting story to do on spec.
It’s prints and drawings rather than books, but as this old article by James Fenton points out, the Print Room of the British Museum allows members of the public to request access to anything in one of the world’s finest collections of them with only “evidence of identification on arrival”.
But, as others have said, in general it depends on the institution.
Interesting Guardian article bonzer thanks. (other link is dead)
When I was a student at UC San Diego, I was permitted to handle a 13th century manuscript volume though I was not in a relevant field of study and could not understand the Latin in which the book was written. But I think you’re watched while you handle such materials, to make sure you don’t damage them.
In Berlin, I was allowed to handle actual drawings by Hieronymus Bosch. I just went to their “Kupferstichkabinett”, signed a card, and they brought them out to me.
When I worked at the Cleveland Public Library, their extensive rare books room, the John G. White Collection, was open to the entire public. Anyone could walk in during library hours without an appointment. There were certain restrictions in effect. It was not open stacks; you had to look in the catalog and then fill out a request form and they bring it to you. Just like at the Library of Congress. Materials of the collection were not allowed out of the room. You had to stay there and look at them. No ink pens were allowed, pencil only. They had a special photocopier designed for rare books with a beveled front edge to avoid placing too much stress on the spine when opening. However, most of the John G. White materials were printed matter from the 19th or early 20th century. I don’t know what it would be like to request a medieval manuscript, if they had any.
To elaborate on what I said earlier, I think it’s fairly common to be allowed to handle/read rare documents if you ask for something specific. But they don’t let you rifle through the materials randomly as they would with open stacks.
The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, on the other hand, is extremely restrictive in whom it allows to use its materials. Virtually nobody is allowed to use the library who is not a graduate or postdoctoral scholar with the appropriate specializations and recommendations. To be fair, my understanding is that it’s not so much a “library” per se as a repository of rare manuscripts, documents, and letters. To the general public it functions as a sort of museum.
Don’t know what’s happening with that link. The BM front page should work, then click on “Departments”, then “Prints and Drawings” and its page has a link about the Study Room, which explains how to see stuff.
In D.C. the Library of Congress will let you handle the rare books. You just have to jump through the hoops* they tell ya to.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/
The unique materials of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, now totaling over 800,000 items, include books, broadsides, pamphlets, theater playbills, prints, posters, photographs, and medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. At the center is Thomas Jefferson’s book collection, which was sold to Congress in 1815
*these
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Personal property not essential to conduct research must be deposited in a place provided for by the division. Currently, this would be in the Reading Room lockers or the Cloakroom facility, located in LJ G08 .
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Exercise the greatest possible care to prevent damage to items from the library’s collections, make no marks on them, rest no object on nor take notes on top of Library material.
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Use pencil when taking written notes.
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Handle the material only at assigned places and return items to a staff member at the Circulation Desk whenever leaving the room, and you must remain in the reading room until a staff member has checked all returned items.
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Observe any special handling condition indicated by the reading room staff.
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Submit for inspection any brief case, typewriter case, parcel, book, notebook, or other personal property before moving it from the room.
In the case of the major London public collections, the trend is towards a general policy of open access.
Paradoxical though it may seem, it was always easier to consult original manuscripts than rare printed books. Most public archives in England have long operated on the assumption that anyone can consult them. The National Archives, the largest of the English archives and the one that has traditionally been seen as the model for best practice by smaller ones, has been freely open to anyone since the nineteenth century (subject only to proof of identity). That is partly because there are some types of public record for which there is a statutory requirement that they be made available for public inspection. When they were set up (usually in the middle years of the twentieth century), most local record offices followed suit.
In contrast, the major research libraries usually preferred to stick to the older system of requiring proof of credentials, such as letters of recommendation. But that is changing. The BL, which formerly had one of the strictest admissions policies, has only recently - and controversially - adopted the same approach as the National Archives. Why? Partly it’s because their reader numbers are falling. But it’s also because there are now far more amateur researchers who don’t have the appropriate academic credentials but who have come to expect that they should have access to public collections.
The most obvious defenders of the older system of restricted access are therefore now the larger university libraries. Having only recently had to renew by reader’s ticket there, I can confirm that the Bodleian’s notorious admissions bureaucracy is as Byzantine as it ever was. And Cambridge University Library would still prefer you to have an ‘academical letter of introduction’ before allowing you in to see Darwin’s papers. But the reluctance of the university libraries to allow in outsiders is increasing counterbalanced by the fact that they can charge such readers for access.
As Gorillaman says, smaller collections are special cases. Most don’t have any policies as such, leaving it to the discretion of the individual librarian/archivist. As they can deal with you on a one-to-one basis during your visit, they can take a risk. But they would also be the ones most likely to expect a very good reason from you before allowing access.
Harvard’s Houghton Library and Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library allow members of the public to sign up to use their rare books and manuscripts on their premises, under their supervision. You do have to fill out at least minimal applications and explain your research interests/affiliations if asked, but you don’t have to have specific academic credentials.
My experience is that the best passport to many rare-books libraries is a) good behavior and b) an intelligent and informed interest in its collection or specific items therein. If you actually know your subject and walk in with a sincere serious question like “is this the 1490 edition with the marginalia of Peurbach or is it the later Cracow version?”,*librarians are apt to trust you as a bona fide researcher, and once that provisional trust is established, they are generally IME pretty indifferent to formal credentials or qualifications. On the other hand, if you are pushy or inconsiderate or don’t follow library rules in handling their materials and so forth, they might be a lot less helpful.
A couple of general tips:
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Do not even THINK about bringing pens or any other prohibited items into the rare-book room. If they require you to stow your stuff in a locker, don’t complain about it.
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The ease of access to the holdings is often inversely proportional to their notoriety. If you walk into the library at Trinity College Dublin and ask to examine the Book of Kells, or into the Walters Art Museum to see the Archimedes Palimpsest, you will probably get nothing for your pains but a brush-off. Famous items are i) generally already being studied by established scholars, ii) handled as little as possible in order to save them from unnecessary wear and tear, and iii) attractive to wackos with tinfoil-hat notions that are no use to the serious research community. We’re talking folks who are convinced that such-and-such a famous codex has, say, instructions for interplanetary vehicle propulsion written in invisible ink around the chapter-head illuminations by space aliens, which they will be able to decipher by shining a cellophane-covered flashlight behind the page. Long-suffering curators of well-known items get quite a few requests for permission to pursue this sort of “research”, and it makes the poor dears rather cynical and suspicious. If, on the other hand, you want to see some obscure item that isn’t a crackpot-magnet, and you have a sensible-sounding reason for it, they are much more likely to take you seriously.
- n.b.: this is a totally artificial “sincere serious question” constructed for example purposes. Sounded pretty impressive though, huh?
As noted, it depends on the library. Gettin to see any books at the Harvatrd Widener Library is practically impossible if you’re not sffiliated with the University in some way, let alone getting near their Rare books.
On the other hand, I was able to get my hands on books in the Rare Books room at the Boston Public Library pretty easily. all I neede was a BPL card, which is easy to get if you’re a Boston area resident (and not even within the city of Boston). They did, of course, insist upon protocols – you couldn’t bring anything in, especially pens. No photos. Note-taking with pencil only on paper. I don’t recal if I had to wear gloves. And you had to be careful with the books.
Not so. The Widener is indeed heavily restricted, but as I noted above, Harvard’s primary repository for rare books and manuscripts is the Houghton Library, which is publicly accessible:
Yes, it may seem a little odd that access to the “ordinary” books in the Widener general library is controlled so much more strictly than access to the rare books in the Houghton. But the Houghton’s collection is smaller, and so is their user population, and they can keep the materials and users under their eye at all times, so they can afford to be less restrictive about user credentials.
Exactly so, which is why is stipulated “Widener”. Houghton Library is something else entirely. In fact, I’ve had no problems getting into others of Harvard’s libraries. I even have a card for the Andover Theological Library. And I’ve gotten copies of things from Houghton. But getting into Widener is a major pain.
The most tightly controlled research collection I’ve worked in was not a rare book room as such, but the Sheet Music collection of the NY Public Library at Lincoln Center. The only way you leave with any of that music in any form is if you’re an extremely fast pencil transcriber or have a photographic memory. They won’t allow a thing to be xeroxed or photoed, chiefly because the world headquarters of ASCAP is across the street. I don’t even know if they’d allow it if you came in with copyright permissions in hand. Luckily, all I wanted was some unintelligible lyrics to match up with a 78rpm recording, so I penciled 'em down on call slips and got out.