SUNDAY 3RD APRIL, 2016 – UWI TODAY
17
We were, after all, in the middle of a war.
There was a
base right here in Chaguaramas bustling with American
soldiers and half the local population trying to find work
there. Trying to unravel themysteries of themovie-theatre
accents, chewing gumand cigarettes.The Americans were
also busy building roads and acquiring a taste for local
wonders like rum, warmth and, um, nocturnal hospitality.
Will anyone ever be able to explainwhy, in all of literature,
every time you hear about American bases, chewing gum
plays such an important role?
In the year…never mind the year, this is exactly
what my professor feared when he sent me in search of
newspaper clippings about forgotten fiction writers of
Trinidad from the 1940s. What he meant was that I was
not to neglect my search for stories, poems and others
clues about the local literary scene in that decade. What
he said was: “Don’t read about the war.”
I read about the war. Because it’s just not possible
to stick to one thing when you can have all the things.
On the second floor of the Alma Jordan Library,
West Indiana has a world-unto-itself air. It is inhabited by
dissertations, rare books, special collections and reference
materials too important or fragile to be left to the dangers
of the general, grubby-pawed public. The people who
use it are as likely to be students as visiting scholars or
independent researchers.
Dr Glenroy Taitt, head of West Indiana, would like
to see more students coming across the border. See,
the secret club aura is not real. In my undergrad days it
pleased me to think of it as private space. I wanted to stay
in that cold (it was always cold), walled-off, closed-door
section of the big rambling building and let the careful
hands of the librarians set the books I asked for in front
of me. Never more than three at a time. This was no
dreamworld but it was the world I dreamt of: West Indian
studies wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. It mattered not one
whit what I was actually meant to be researching, there
was always a reason to find a West Indian connection
or reference.
Ask not what you can do for West Indiana
but definitely ask what it can do for you
Dr Taitt has in his care the Special Collections of the
St. Augustine Campus. The papers of Eric Williams are
here. So too those of Sam Selvon – the author himself
donated them to the university. Part of the CLR James
collection is here. These are some of the better-known
treasures. The names are famous and there’s an added
layer of importance that comes from – in the case of
these three in particular – being part of Unesco’s Memory
of the World programme. There are less popular ones,
less, arguably, significant ones. But that’s where the real
alchemy that makes for the best research happens. Once
the West Indiana and Special Collections folk agree to
admit your body of work or papers into their realm,
everything becomes important.
A giant corpus of legal material – estates, deeds,
conveyances, small disputes – may seem dull even to law
students. But to a historical novelist, it may be a brilliant
source of quarry for a new work. With these legal papers
a writer might bring from the past a story of ancestral
fortunes, draw characters who may love or hate each
other depending on the vagaries of inheritance, consider
preferred china patterns of a household if it exists in an
inventory of sale items. Imagine, this is by no means
the most or even nearly the most extreme example of
interdisciplinary work.
Whenmost of us think ofWest Indiana, we think it is
for students inHumanities or Social Sciences. Consider: it
started all the way back whenThe UWI was the Imperial
College of Tropical Agriculture. Yes, you could say it
started as a science library. All of this really does have
something to do with crossing faculties for better research.
West Indiana and the discipline of thinking carefully
about what I needed (remember, only three books at a
time) and being very careful handling some fairly old
type-written theses helped me to care about the work I
was looking at and the people who kept it safe for me.
Because these things felt precious I wanted to make the
most of them, so I learned to take better notes and keep a
sharp eye out for something that might helpme later on or
for a different reason from whatever the current one was.
Even during my war days I did not disparage the rest
of the library. Far from it. Each floor had special nooks,
tables or windows I spent time at. If I was thinking of
Shakespeare I’d find a reason to be in the history section.
Diaspora writing sent me to comparative religion and
myth. And on a good day with not much to do I could take
up residence in the sociology stacks to work on something
truly important like poetry.
Get thee to a library
While West Indiana was never actually off limits to
anyone, the process of accessing material if you were an
undergrad required special permission. Those were the
bad old days. Now, the division is open to all campus
students and they are working on outreach programmes to
encourage greater use of the resources. Once per semester
an open lecture draws in academics from different
backgrounds to discuss the different ways specific types
of information can be used to enrich research. The most
recent one, on the use of journals and diaries as source
matter, was facilitated by historian Dr. Brinsley Samaroo
and Dr. Nicol Albada frompsychology. The session is very
deliberately set up like this to demonstrate how students
fromvaried disciplines can approach the same information
and draw from it the facets relevant to them.
There’s also the Teaching with Special Collections
programme. Here, faculty is encouraged to use West
Indiana, but in particular focusing on the unique, the
specially archived, original manuscripts and the like.
Lecturers are encouraged to use this information to find
new and engaging ways to teach. It’s important for this to
reach the undergraduate part of the campus.
That keeps coming up, doesn’t it, this business of
preaching to the first-degree seekers? So much of the
work being undertaken by West Indiana and Special
Collections is trying to make itself more accessible to
the whole university and the wider public. The online
catalogue of dissertations – the effort of digitizing as much
as possible – can compete with far more resource-rich
schools. The work is labour intensive and plentiful. But
it has such noble goals: changing the perspective of the
division as one that caters to graduate students and foreign
academics; nor is it just for those reading arts or social
sciences. All the work, all the programmes, are taking a
hard look a student body long accustomed to getting by
with their course books and a handful of references to
pass their exams and term papers. And what they see is
the need to increase the analytic skills of, well, everyone.
The methodological acumen needs a boost. We need the
ability to think beyond the easiest, most superficial way
through the course outline.
The above, it’s not hype, and no, the library staff
are not collectively running for guild positions. There
are serious gaps and flaws in how we think about our
education: the main one is a lack of stretch and creativity
in how we conduct our research. Go talk to someone at
the library about how to strengthen your work.
My travels through
WEST INDIANA
B Y A N U L A K H A N
Anu Lakhan is a writer and editor. She still reads books made of paper.
“Despite the move to e-resources, students are still
visiting their university library quite often and spending
significant time there when they do. Particularly in the arts
and humanities, undergraduates may well spendmore time
with their librarian than with their lecturer. That time is
spent supporting students to become self-directed learners
through our information literacy consultations,” he says.
“We are the stewards of the heritage materials of the
region, organizing them for access, and preservation, and
to represent the cultural identity of the Caribbean. The
technology helps us to make that heritage visible to the
world. Once digitized, content from institutions such as
The UWI can be an important economic force as a source of
material to be re-used for added-value services and products
in sectors such as tourism and education, for example.”
The challenges are many and the resources are few, but
Soodeen is committed to finding creative and innovative
ways to keep on the edge of technology, and he believes
it will come by continuous collaboration with faculty,
researchers and students, aligning library services in terms
of the evolving teaching and learning modalities.
He wants people to see the library as both a physical and
virtual environment, and as a place of learning – a cultural
and social space.
(Vaneisa Baksh)
