Howard Dodson, the director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, in the center's reading room.
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: March 14, 2012
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An 1863 issue of Douglass' Monthly, part of the collection at Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Andrew Councill for The New York Times
A Civil War recruiting poster.
Those were just a few of the harsh words Howard Dodson , the recently retired chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, used to describe Howard University's library system in a December 2011 consultant's report.
Administrative inattention, draconian budget cuts and leadership gaps had also tarnished a jewel at this elite, historically black university: the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one of the world's largest collections devoted to the history and culture of people of African descent.
Now it's up to the consultant to fix these problems. Last month the university lured Mr. Dodson out of retirement to become director of its undergraduate and graduate libraries and Moorland-Spingarn.
"There are only two major repositories in the world that document the global black experience and one of them, Moorland-Spingarn, has been in a state of crisis for the last two and a half years," as both Moorland and the library system lacked permanent directors, Mr. Dodson said of his main reason for taking the job. "I was making my own plans for retirement, but the ancestors had other plans for me."
Those ancestors surely inhabit Moorland, which consists of a library and a manuscript division, university archives and the Howard Museum. It has more than 175,000 bound volumes; 100,000 photographs and other graphic items; tens of thousands of journals, periodicals, and newspapers; and nearly 1,000 audio tapes. The papers, diaries and memorabilia of people like Frederick Douglass and the writer and scholar Alain Locke, rare works by the 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley and the papers of the Congressional Black Caucus are all part of its holdings.
"This is one of the important collections to understand African-American culture writ large," said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture . "I am thinking of the early African-American newspapers and the petitions demanding freedom. Through them you understand the struggle of a people and the resilience of a people."
Moorland "now trails behind the Schomburg , though, and has been hidden for the last few years," Mr. Bunch added. "One of the challenges for Howard Dodson and Howard University is to make it clear to people what is there at Moorland-Spingarn and its importance." His museum is scheduled to open here in 2015.
Money is the main reason Moorland and the libraries Mr. Dodson assessed (the main undergraduate and graduate library and the branches for the architecture, business, divinity and social work schools) are in this state, many staff, faculty and students said in recent interviews.
The research center had its genesis in the donation of a private library in 1914. Now at least 60 percent of the collection has been neither sorted nor made accessible. Much is in storage off campus or inadequately preserved. The budget, about $3.5 million in 1994, was cut about 60 percent initially and is now about $800,000, while the staff shrank to about one-fifth of its 1994 size in the same period.
The lack of resources "has affected the work," Joellen El Bashir, the curator of manuscripts at Moorland, said in an interview. "We need a place to store this stuff. Can you feel the temperature? We need room to process and spread out." She estimated that 350 scholars from around the world come to Moorland annually to do research, and that the staff fields 2,000 queries a year.
Mr. Dodson said that for Moorland and the main library group Howard's financing lags badly compared with the other members of the Association of Research Libraries, a group that also includes well-endowed Ivy League institutions. The median investment in members' libraries was $22 million in 2009-10; Howard's investment was $8.3 million, 1 percent of its overall budget. Sidney A. Ribeau, the president of the university since 2008, conceded that there had been "a kind of drift," over the years. "There was not the kind of focused attention one would have liked," he said.
In 2010, as students, faculty members and alumni sounded an alarm over Moorland's state, the university hosted a conference with archivists, scholars and librarians from around the country to focus attention on the center. A report with recommendations to address the problems followed.
Moorland's problems have been "symptomatic of the struggle of the university" to do much with limited resources, said Greg E. Carr, a conference co-chairman and an associate professor of Africana Studies.
Mr. Ribeau said the university's fiscal woes of the past several years have caused widespread pain, with major deferred maintenance and a big hit to the endowment. But he and the trustees have a goal to increase university financing of the library to 3 percent of the operating budget in the next three to five years, Mr. Ribeau said.
Joseph Reidy, an associate provost, said the administration pursued Mr. Dodson, who was widely praised for his acquisitions and fund-raising prowess during his tenure at the Schomburg from 1984 to 2011, because it felt that Howard's libraries could be restored to their former status.
But even with the promised increases the task will be difficult. In his report Mr. Dodson said it will easily take $20 million of university and other kinds of support "just to start" to fix Howard's problems. His goals include digitizing the collection, more than doubling the professional library staff and reorganizing and upgrading the facilities.
Undeterred, Mr. Dodson preaches patience. It will take three to five years to turn things around, he estimated. The other day he took a visitor on a campus tour that included a stop at the Moorland-Spingarn reading room. It was sunny and elegant, with a fireplace and glass bookcases — and just one person sitting at one of its long wooden tables.
"Come back soon," Mr. Dodson said, his voice full of promise. "This whole place will be a hub of activity."
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