Word: hazen
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...Hazen jokes that he’s worked for HCL forever—more precisely, twenty years. For the last six, he has served as Associate Librarian for Collection Development...
Harvard’s libraries maintain no special collections devoted exclusively to sex and sexuality. But, according to Hazen, “Explicit stuff? We’ve got a lot of it.” Search on HOLLIS for “Erotica” or “Pornography,” and you might be surprised by the results...
Responsibility for collection development is distributed among HCL’s bibliographers, each of whom is assigned to suggest new collection items from a specific part of the world. Hazen said, “[We take] pride in being able to ferret out both the mainstream and the fringes, presenting a full spectrum of what’s being said and thought and argued.” There are no particular rules by which bibliographers must abide, provided the material is legal. For proposed collection additions, price is more often an issue than objectionable content...
About fifteen years ago, a professor offered to donate a complete run of Penthouse Magazine to Widener Library. (Which professor? “I probably shouldn’t say,” Hazen laughed.) The collection was to be stored behind the desk in the Periodicals Room, requiring patron request for use. This ultimately didn’t work out, but only because, as Hazen put it, “The older women on staff were extraordinarily uncomfortable with the notion they’d have to be handing that stuff over...
...scholarly interests have shifted toward legitimizing the study of sexuality and pornography, explicit literature has grown increasingly accepted in research library collections. In fact, Hazen said, the difficult question is more frequently where to store material, not whether to accept it in the first place. Pornography is typically housed in closed circulation areas—not for moral concerns, but because, in Hazen’s experience, “it disappears almost as fast as you put it on the shelf.” When the books and magazines themselves aren’t stolen, explicit images are often...