Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T21:57:44.666Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Have They Done to the Evidence?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Annette Fern
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Some years ago, during a discussion in the ASTR Executive Committee about the relevance of the Theatre Library Association's participation in ASTR, a scholar on the cutting edge of contemporary theory is reported to have asked a TLA representative exactly what it was that libraries were doing to support postpositivist research. No one remembers what the answer was (it was evidently satisfactory), but I recall thinking that if I had been asked the question, my own reply would have been that libraries weren't doing anything at all; that the business of the library was to preserve the evidence as well as it could and provide access to it, so that scholars could make use of it in whatever manner they chose.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , November 2004 , pp. 195 - 201
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Annette Fern spent her working life as a public services librarian specializing in the humanities and the performing arts. She has held positions in the reference departments of the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and in 1996 became Research and Reference Librarian at the Harvard Theatre Collection. She retired from Harvard in 2003. In 2004 she was the recipient of the Theatre Library Association's award for Distinguished Achievement in Service and Support of Performing Arts Libraries.