If
the book-lined walls of the Botany Branch
Library at the Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History could talk,
they would speak through the mouth of
Mrs. Ruth Schallert. Incidentally, she
is the sole librarian, and has single-handedly
cared for all 60,000 of the books in
the collection for the past 40 years.
When the Smithsonian sent out the call
for a librarian in the newly constructed
Botany Branch Library in the winter
of 1966, Mrs. Schallert answered, and
has been a part of the Museum of National
History's history ever since.
The
west wing of the museum had just been
built, and the Botany Library was still
undergoing construction, when Ruth began
the formidable task of organizing the
museum's jumbled Botany collection.
Catalogued in both the Dewey Decimal,
and Library of Congress systems, the
books were not so much organized, but
disorganized, in such a state of disarray
that researches had to look two places
for one book. Mrs. Schallert completed
the daunting challenge of synthesizing
the collection into the research-friendly
Library of Congress system in 1989.
She became a leading expert in the bibliography
of botany, assisting fellow experts
from around the world, their names on
the title pages of her books, with their
daunting botany projects in turn.
In
the midst of the cataloguing and research,
the Botany Branch Library, in the form
of Ruth Schallert, has been transformed
into an entity with a history that is
as worthy of study as the botanical
bible, the Hitchcock-Chase Agrostological
Library of literature on grasses. Ruth
can indeed point you in the direction
of the Hitchcock-Chase collection she
has so diligently organized on the library
shelves, walking directly past the windowsill
where she temporarily grew a marijuana
plant for a legendary grass curator,
and subsequently evaded suspicious FBI
agents, who publicly confiscated the
illegal substance, much to her embarrassment.
When she leads you to the special book,
she may recall the broken toe she suffered
some thirty years ago after reaching
for a rare book in a special locked
case which fell out of its protective
slipcover and landed on her foot. She
will probably add that after one of
her often talked about 60 pound Huskies
stepped on the book beaten toe later
in the evening she knew her appendage
was broken, and woefully cursed the
botanists on the fifth floor for keeping
special books in their offices far too
long, forcing her to keep rare books
under lock and key and apparently, out
of even her own reach. Mrs. Schallert
always used the power of her position,
as the one and only librarian, appropriately.
Staff in the botany department began
to worry, however, when they found her
measuring the office of research scientist
Bob Faden one afternoon, a space which
just so happened to be right next to
the library she was outgrowing.
Indeed,
Ruth Schallert's stories, which are
essentially the museum's stories, are
as special and rare as the one-of-a-kind
books she has housed in her Botany Branch
Library for the past forty years.
-
Morgan Little
