A Pavane for these Distracted Times

NADINA GARDNER: A PAVANE FOR THESE DISTRACTED TIMES A Pavane for these Distracted Times NADINA GARDNER ’m grateful to Eric Holzenberg and the Grolier Club for asking me to be a part I of this examination of a serious subject: libraries in hard times. I’ve taken the title of my remarks from another period of hard times: the English Civil War, when Thomas Tomkins and William Lawes, court musicians to Charles I, wrote, respectively, a “Pavane for these Distracted Times” and a “Pavane for these Troubled Times.” I won’t be able to deliver on the literal promise of my title, unless our moderator, Mark Dimunation, can push a button to cue the viols, but I do want to talk about certain themes that emerge from the situation that libraries currently find themselves in. We know the dismal facts. Libraries have lost endowment, many of them as much as a third. Some of the country’s largest and most well-endowed institutions have suffered the most in this regard. Libraries have lost staff through lay-offs, termination, and early retirement. Some have instituted furloughs in order to keep as much of the staff in place as possible. Because I’ve heard of some libraries losing large numbers of staff, I reacted with no particular surprise recently when a university special collections librarian mentioned to me that his unit at the library was losing one staff member. But then he proceeded to list all the activities and projects that would have to be stopped or ...