Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Janie Johnson, architecture librarian at The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was impressed by what she saw after a visit to the Technical Reference Center, which is the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s reference library, and the archives at the college’s CRS Center for Leadership and Management in the Design and Construction Industry.
Johnson and eight other librarians from South Africa’s three major research universities are touring university libraries throughout the United States to learn how their facilities can better support faculty and student research in South Africa. The trip, Johnson’s first to the U.S., began March 19 and ends May 2.
“I’m really impressed with the slide collection,” said Johnson of the TRC’s massive cache of more than 153,000 slides, which includes images of architecture and art, construction and landscape architecture.
She saw TRC staffers busy converting the collection into a digital format.
“I think it’s absolutely fantastic,” said Johnson of the TRC’s digitalization of the slide collection. “In architecture, it’s the image that is so important. I’m really jealous of the collection, because I don’t have one this large,” she said.
Paula Bender, head of the TRC, found during Johnson’s visit that there are many similarities between the two facilities’ collections and procedures.
“It’s interesting to think you can be that far apart and yet you’re pretty much on the same path,” said Bender.
Johnson also visited the CRS Center, which houses the archives of the center’s founding firm CRS, an internationally renowned architectural firm responsible for a number of innovations in architectural practice.
“I was very impressed with the center’s archives because of the importance of the firm and the materials that are available for architecture students,” she said.
She’s found the availability of the CRS Center’s archives an inspiration for the future of two collections at her library.
“We have a collection of drawings that trace the development of Modernism in South Africa beginning in the 1940s,” said Johnson. “The collection begins at the time precast concrete came in and made a major change to building techniques and use of building materials.”
Her library also has a collection of correspondence between an architecture researcher and the renowned architect Le Corbusier.
“The collections need a lot of work; we can’t make them available to researchers because they aren’t at that stage yet,” she said. “We hope to someday make the materials available to our students and the public.”
Johnson and her fellow librarian’s trips to the United States’ top research institutions such as Yale University, Purdue University and the University of Washington, are part of a three-year project funded by the Carnegie Foundation.
In a blog called Librarians on the Move at salibraryacademy.blogspot.com, Johnson and her fellow librarians are chronicling their findings, large and small.
In South Africa, where motorists drive on the left side of the road, turning left on a red light is illegal; during Johnson’s visit, she’s encountered its legal U.S. counterpart.
“The turn right on red rule freaks me out,” she wrote in one post.
“What surprises me most is how similar we are,” she said. “I’d always thought Americans are very different from us, but when you visit universities, the way people study, the way librarians work, we are in most ways so similar … the things we worry about, things we discuss, we share the same interests.”
She said Americans visiting her country would be disappointed by its high crime rate.
“We all have huge walls and security systems around our properties,” she said. “You can’t just walk onto a university campus, because there’s security everywhere.”
“In many ways we have no freedom,” she said. “I go around in the suburbs here, and see that people don’t have walls; it’s just much more open.”
- Posted: May 4, 2009-
