Teaching and Learning with Collections: The Library as a Site for Exploration and Inspiration

The library is commonly seen as a site for information seeking and directed research, yet it may also serve as a site for exploration and inspiration. The library as Wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities, explored through the senses, is not a new idea, but one that is commonly lost in today's disembodied digital universe. Library architecture sometimes promotes this identity. But when libraries are mute, and librarians are focused on information competencies, how do students come to perceive the library as a site of exploration and inspiration? Carnegie Mellon University's Arts Library and Special Collections Department believes that teaching and learning with rare and unique collections—and sometimes even with circulating collections—addresses this question and has special application to the education of arts students. A number of case studies with architecture students are presented in this article.


Learning and the Library
Today's libraries and librarians are deeply invested in information literacy as a concept and as a method to fulfill their responsibilities for instruction and student learning. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) defines information literacy as "...a set of abilities requiring individuals to 'recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.'"1 ACRL's Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education argue that information literacy is an essential human need in the context of "rapid technological change and prolif erating information resources," and helps to assure a "more informed citizenry" with the "cluster of abilities necessary to use information effectively."2 Libraries and librarians are encour aged to go forth and address this need and instruct students in information literacy competencies. Librarians have become familiar with the ACRL standards and with these arguments. While information literacy competencies are commonly seen as cross-disciplinary, there is a parallel emphasis on competen cies that are specific to individual disciplines. Arts libraries and librarians have their own competency standards?Information Competencies for Students in Design Disciplines?produced on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North America in 2007. These standards emphasize the development of basic, inter mediate, and advanced skills for students in the fields of architecture, architecture history, landscape architecture, art history, studio arts, planning, fashion, interior design, and museum studies. Librarians and teaching faculty are encour aged to systematically instruct students to execute an extensive array of discipline-specific information-seeking activities, and to master an additional array of knowledge about the organization of information in their field. As with the ACRL standards, the competencies are rigorous and tightly focused on skill develop ment.3 Meanwhile, archivists and special collections librarians are promoting "primary source literacy" without yet codifying competencies.4 The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries have an active Information Literacy in the Disciplines program that has been formally embraced by the university. Information literacy is one of the "new literacies" (ethics, environment, globaliza tion, and information) cited in the university's 2008 self-study report for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, where it is also described as one of four competencies (oral and written communication, scientific and quantitative reasoning, technological competency, and information literacy) pursued by undergraduate students at Carnegie Mellon. Information Literacy in the Disciplines programming includes the schools that make up Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts. There are substantial activities and accomplishments to note in this area with these schools, yet information literacy is not the whole story.
According to ACRL, "information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning."5 This language comes close to suggesting that informa tion literacy is essential to effective learning. After participating in the ACRL Information Literacy Immersion program, Aniko Halverson refers?in the best possible way?to "the cult of information literacy."6 This turn of phrase should perhaps cause one to wonder not so much about what information literacy has become, but what it has excluded. A broad definition of informa tion notwithstanding, the "cult" of information literacy suggests that learning is about information seeking and directed research, and limits the role of the library to these ends. This is not wrong so much as incomplete.
Lowry Burgess, professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, presented "Muses in the Library" as part of the 2006 Digital Libraries Colloquium Series in Pittsburgh. In the abstract for his presentation Burgess wrote, "It is my contention that as the 'cyberization' of information provides more and more disembodied information access, the physical library becomes eroticized (a place of direct social and sensory contact) and more a 'muse-eum' where the various muses dwell?those compan ions of Apollo, guardian of boundless human inspiration. The new library becomes a 'Wunderkammer?/ a place for 'musing' and wonder, a place of direct contact and interaction with people, ideas, and multiple library objects and systems."7 In the context of the colloquium series, Burgess was discussing the need to incorporate more of the intrinsic quali ties of libraries into library information systems through virtual reality or other techniques. Librarians would all welcome the transformation of their largely vanilla systems, though this still seems very far away. But Burgess also casts the library as a sensory place, even more than before the digital revolution. This understanding has implications for teaching and learning in the library, especially for studio arts and architecture students who may be largely visual and tactile learners, and whose creative work may be rooted more in the senses than in information.
Burgess also says that the library "is a place to seek a broader inspiration beyond the notion of the acquisition of data or information."8 In "Libraries & the Inspiration Business," Brian Mathews writes, "Librarians today do more than simply orga nize, provide, and interpret information. We transform users' experiences, collaborating with them along their path toward self-improvement.... Wfhile building collections and providing assistance remain significant, there is definitely an evolving shift toward this more proactive role for librarians as facilitators who not only change the way patrons use content but also aim to enrich their lives."9 Matthews emphasizes the librarian's inspi rational role as a facilitator of personal self-improvement, but we might also consider the inspirational aspects of teaching and learning with library collections.

Library as Wunderkammer
Burgess refers to the library as a Wunderkammer, a wonder room or cabinet of curiosities, or museum, dating from the made objects were collected and given equal footing. People would explore such a collection with the senses, and select, examine, and contemplate the objects in order to develop new knowledge and insights. Burgess welcomes diverse objects and media as muses in his conception of a library, and he calls the Wunderkammer a "pre-library library." The term Wunderkammer has also been used to describe specific collections of books, and even books that are catalogs of other books or objects. The library as Wunderkammer is not a new metaphor or idea, but it is commonly lost in today's disembodied digital universe. Library architecture sometimes promotes this identity. Library buildings frequently feature names of literary and scientific greats carved in a frieze or in some other manner on a fa?ade, as found at the Boston Public Library designed by the prominent firm of McKim, Mead and White. According to Walter Muir Whitehill, "McKim had sought to relieve the severity of the Figure  the great arched windows tablets were carved with the names of literary men, artists, scientists, statesmen, and soldiers, which served not only as a decorative relief but constituted a kind of roll of honor." These names "suggest the diversity of riches to be found within."10 The Eberswalde Polytechnic Library in Brandenburg, Germany, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in 1999 (Figure 2), reinvents this practice for the present age. The building itself has been compared to a "picture book."11 It is wrapped in a fa?ade that is etched and screen-printed with provocative photographs and paintings in a way that is analogous to sgraffito or tattoo. The images promote the library as a repository of culture and science and of intellectual and visual memory.12 The specific images, as identified by Gerhard Mack, are: Mack documents the image choices and their interpretations for both the designers and the community. They tell stories of the arts and sciences, and particularly of East German society and politics. The last two save one are of particular interest for present purposes. One shows a rather antiseptic interior (which could be almost any library) with college students sitting with books and papers at long desks. The other shows Alexander von Humboldt and Aim? Bonpland with papers, scientific instru ments, and botanical specimens strewn wildly about a table fashioned from trees, with the jungle creeping in (Figure 3). Alexander von Humboldt, a founding supporter of Eberswalde Such classes commonly involve collaborative teaching. Librarians and teaching faculty contribute their expertise and insight as curators, experts, and educators in ways that reinforce and amplify course content and objectives. Students are exposed to carefully selected library materials that act as vehicles for exploration and inspiration.
While some of the class time may be more or less scripted, students commonly have the opportunity to explore collections at their own pace and select, examine, and contemplate books or other objects in order to develop new knowledge and insights in the spirit of the Wunderkammer. Librarians and teaching faculty circulate among the students to encourage exploration and answer questions. Some items must be displayed behind glass or on book cradles, but in such a supervised setting students are permitted to handle most materials to promote hands-on interac tion and understanding.
Learning is frequently embodied in subsequent course proj ects that emphasize making?from writing essays to making interdisciplinary art projects. Student writers in the Beginning Poetry Workshop and art students have crafted artists' books; students in Communication Design Fundamentals have designed posters; and architecture students have built and exhibited archi tectural models of Le Corbusier's villas. Students may return independently to review specific items or further explore the collections. Recently an art student who had been exposed to the Artists' Books Collection returned to utilize the collection in an animated short film. The film pans from the Fine and Rare Book Room's signage and exterior to follow the path of a library cart entering the space; pans from rows of books to selected artists' books; and then enters those books to create a story arc (a love story) following characters as they jump from book to book and scenario to scenario. The library as Wunderkammer, indeed.
My librarian colleagues have taught with collections for many years, and I too have done so almost unknowingly from time to time. However, I first grasped the promise of this approach in the context of Critical Histories of the Arts, an introductory course for freshmen in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities & Social Sciences. As architecture librarian and archivist, my subsequent experience lies largely with classes from the School of Architecture.

Case Study: Rediscovering Antiquity
The Critical Histories of the Arts course was designed to examine pluralistic histories of the arts in different regions and periods, including the classical Greek world. A teaching assistant who had been introduced to the rare book collection as a student intern invited the special collections librarian to present the university's first edition of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762-1818) to the class. I went along to present material on the classical revival architecture of early twentieth-century Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon campus.
In this case we took the volumes to a classroom, where the teaching professor set the scene. The special collections librarian displayed the Antiquities of Athens and discussed its eighteenth century vision and values and its role in classical studies. Students learned that Stuart and Revett, eighteenth-century British artists and architects, were the first to survey, measure, and draw the Acropolis and other key sites of ancient Athens.
They visited Greece in 1751 and published their findings in four folio volumes over the next fifty years. We discussed rare books as artifacts and the publishing and graphic techniques that make the Antiquities of Athens a title of enduring value. Students were invited to examine the volumes during the class. The collab orative effort between teaching faculty and librarians allowed students to explore one of the library's treasures and to learn about the persistence of classical Athens on their own campus.
Subsequently, the special collections librarian and I presented the Antiquities of Athens again for a course entitled Rediscovering Antiquity: Travelers, Archaeologists and Architects in the Mediterranean. Though it continued a theme of Critical Histories of the Arts, the latter course is a bit of an outlier in the School of Architecture. It addresses ancient cities and archaeological sites of Greece and Turkey not so much as signs of the Greek and Roman past but as objects of the late eighteenth-and nineteenth century era of rediscovery.
A class visit to the Fine and Rare Book Room enabled these students, if not to rediscover antiquity themselves, to explore genuine artifacts of the rediscovery, in the form of publications of the time (see the source list at the end of this article). We exam ined and discussed classic works by Vitruvius (1552), Vignola (16-?), and Palladio (1738), in addition to Stuart andRevett (1762-1830). Description de VEgypte, the record of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1809-1828) was a crowd pleaser. We did not show all twenty-three volumes, but the elephant folios with their extraordinary engravings took full advantage of our largest table and captivated the students with their expansiveness and their detail.
We also presented a series of lesser known works that offer descriptions and "restorations" of Mycenae (Schliemann, 1878), Olympie (Laloux, 1889), Epidaure (Lechat, 1895), and Pergame (Collignon, 1900), as well as those architecture school traditional favorites Espouy's Fragments d'architecture antique (189-?-1905) and Monuments antiques (1910). Pattern books with longwinded titles brought the story into the eighteenth and nineteenth centu ries and to America. These included works by James Gibbs (1753), William Pain (1799), and John Haviland (1818-1821). The students had the opportunity to explore many of these titles on their own. They went on to create content for an interpretive project at the Hall of Architecture of the Carnegie Museum of Art, one of the world's most extraordinary collections of architectural plaster casts and a type of Wunderkammer in its own right. Volume 30, Number 1 ? 2011 ? Art Documentation Case Study: Architectural Representation From time to time classes come to the library to view architectural drawings from the Carnegie Mellon University Architecture Archives in the Fine and Rare Book Room. A class on campus architect Henry Hornbostel utilizes the collections extensively for their research value. Conversely, a Drawing and Media Elective course visits the Architecture Archives to expose students to a wide variety of representation methods. For an assignment called "Drawing from Precedents," the students are asked to select a specific drawing that they find engaging, and they are given the time and opportunity to study it closely. Students ultimately choose an attribute (palette, composition, quality of light, sense of space, clarity of line, etc.) and introduce it into a drawing or drawings of their own from a design project. The archival drawings and the student drawings may then be viewed side by side, creating a dialogue between the past and the present, the archives and the studio. First-or second-year studio classes also come to see drawing techniques to expand their knowledge of representational methods and to explore alternative directions for their own design work. We gather around a massive table built on four stacks of flat files. I present works from the Architecture Archives that range from the 1870s to the 1970s, from construction draw ings to fine renderings. Media and techniques range from linen to Mylar, from pen and ink washes to pencil and colored pencil, from charcoal to pastel to watercolor. The dialogue with teaching faculty and students commonly focuses on the astonishing quali ties of the drawings, historical changes in architectural practice, practical skills such as line weights, and how today's students may find their way along a spectrum of analog to digital repre sentation techniques.
For the second-semester first-year studio, this is also an opportunity to explore selected large folio volumes and portfo lios of plates (see source list). These documents present diverse examples of architectural representation, and they are frequently fine demonstrations of architectural representation in their own right. Such publications offer reproduction qualities and advantages of scale that are unrivaled in monographs and more clearly communicate lessons of technique. In a few cases they provide large-format construction drawings that are not other wise obtainable. Varieties of technique overlap with varieties of presentation formats, from Tadao Ando's accordion-like Emaki Style Sketchbooks (2005) to the miscellaneous parts of Daniel Libeskind and Cecil Balmond's Unfolding (1997).
Students also explore the Boxes and Folios series published in the 1980s and early 1990s by the Architectural Association in London.
These extraordinary volumes demonstrate the diver sity of possible approaches to a task within the constraints of a medium of presentation?which is, with few exceptions, a black box with internal dimensions of 12"xl2"x.5". Each box is a designed object that contains documentation of a design project, or projects, adapted or specifically designed for this publication.
Each box is a Wunderkammer.

Case Study: Nolli and Le Corbusier
In the fall of 2009, incoming first-year architecture students visited the library in studio groups for an orientation to library work, specifically focused on architecture, and a tour of the Arts Library. We do this every year, but this time the studio faculty and I had more ambitious plans.
The initial studio project focused on the campus public realm. Student groups were assigned to investigate and draw one of twenty-five quadrants of the campus in the manner of Giambattista Nolli's La pianta grande di Roma (the Nolli Map of Rome), which would ultimately be assembled into a single campus map. Students would get to know their new campus while they learned about public and private space. I visited the class and lectured on the history of the campus and its architec ture to get them started. This occurred before their orientation visit and enabled the students to meet me first as a subject expert. On a subsequent visit to the library I laid out the facsimile edition of the Nolli map on our very large table. These days the Nolli map is available at the Interactive Nolli Map Web site, and the students had seen it there. However, they were mesmerized by the complexity of the facsimile in contrast to what they had seen on the screen, and what they were producing for their project.
They viewed the facsimile map as if they were seeing their assignment for the first time.18 A subsequent project for the first-year students addressed fundamentals of design and representation, utilizing the villas of Le Corbusier as a vehicle. Each student was assigned a villa to investigate. Such an assignment is not a new idea, but it was new to Carnegie Mellon where "precedent" has often been treated as a bad word.19 The students were told that they would learn the fundamentals of design and research and the conventions of graphic communication and spatial modelmaking?specifically: Fundamental freehand and drafting techniques Methods of drawing (plans, sections, elevations, axono metrics) The use of tracing paper How to use the library to obtain documentation and other information The understanding of architectural scale The role of program and its three-dimensional implica tions The organizational principles behind a design The graphic communication of structure, enclosure, doors, windows, etc.

Line weight
How to construct a study model and techniques of spatial modelmaking Drawing composition The spatial system of the building, relevant ideas of the architects, architectural terms, and a whole lot more...
Note the way that the library work is tucked in there almost randomly?to the author's mind exactly where it belongs?as a skill among skills in the broad skill set of an aspiring architect. The library orientation session was adapted to include instruction on researching Le Corbusier villas. There was some need for articles, but books from the circulating collection, refer ence resources, and a few titles secured in a special location were the most useful. The last group of titles not so inciden tally required the students to interact with librarians for access, especially when word got out about how useful they were. The students continued to visit the library to research their villas.
Nevertheless, we planned an additional library session to keep them coming, to further convince them that there might be interesting things in the collections, to provide them with the  When the studio groups came back to the library I walked and talked them through the exhibit, sharing what I had learned. I discovered that Le Corbusier frequently referred to himself as a "man of letters" and an "architect of books." He wrote at least thirty-five books on art, architecture, and urban planning, partic ipated in the publication of others, and conceived many more that were never completed. Much of his creative output can be measured in publications. He utilized publications to promote his ideas and beliefs, publicize his ongoing work, and document his built and unbuilt projects. They also served as a means of self-promotion and argumentation. He provided text, graphic, and photographic content, and he frequently recycled content from one publication to another. He participated in all aspects of book design?format, paper, typeface, layout, cover design. The image of an open book often appears as a symbol or icon in his artwork and his books. Over time, his books rivaled his architectural oeuvre and revealed the evolution of his thinking as a designer.
After one student was drafted to model the Modular for the class, we turned them loose for a casual workshop of sorts.
They could browse the exhibit as well as duplicates of the books that were on display, other books authored by Le Corbusier, key monographs, and key reference resources and other works rele vant to their project. Some titles for the exhibit and the workshop came from the rare book or other non-circulating collections, and a few were borrowed from the professor's private collection, but many were drawn from the reference or circulating collections (see source list). A few weeks later, when the students had completed their project work, they delivered their models of Le Corbusier's villas to the library to be displayed with the book exhibit in the Fine and Rare Book Room. This enhanced Wunderkammer became the setting for a public event on Homecoming weekend. The students were welcomed to the library for their third official visit of the semester?and they all came at once this time. The models were extremely impressive, and the students stood at the ready to discuss "their" villas with peers, faculty, and alumni. There was much taking of photographs, and photos phoned home to parents. The school was very pleased with the results. This series of early encounters with the library was unprec edented for the incoming architecture students. They became comfortable in the library and familiar with the architecture librarian. They learned to explore what the library had to offer, to utilize a variety of library resources, and to perceive library collections as part of architectural study and production. Finally, they had the chance to show off some of their earliest work in a now familiar and possibly inspiring place.

Conclusion
Teaching and learning with collections provides an impor tant complement to other library instructional programs. This practice promotes the library as WunderMmmer, and, in a sort of recursive symmetry, specific collections, books, and other library materials as VJunderkammers in their own rights. Teaching and learning with collections creates opportunities for collaboration with teaching faculty around course content, integrating student library experiences with academic work.
Rare and unique collections, though seldom the center of attention these days, are among libraries7 greatest assets.21 Their content may be difficult to obtain or fully appreciate in other formats, and their artifactual qualities bring authenticity to learning. These same characteristics may be found within circu lating collections as well. Today's project-focused and overwired students benefit from the opportunity to explore such collections and find inspiration for their creative work.
Source Lists