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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Library of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction The beginnings of
The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Inc.,
and its renowned library date back to 1938, when Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a
biology professor at Indiana University, was asked to coordinate a new
noncredit marriage preparation class petitioned for by the Association of
Women Students. As students began coming to Dr. Kinsey with questions
about sexual behavior, he found few scientific studies on which to base
his answers. Dr. Kinsey's response to this void was to begin his own
descriptive study of Americans' sexual behaviors and attitudes. During the next eighteen years, more than seventeen thousand sexual histories were gathered. As context for his project and because he was a collector by nature, Dr. Kinsey began acquiring books, films, art, and artifacts related to human sexuality. To protect the confidentiality of the sex histories and the ownership of the other materials, Dr. Kinsey, at the suggestion of the president of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells, established the Institute for Sex Research as a not-for-profit corporation affiliated with Indiana University. In 1947 Dr. Kinsey sold his art and library materials to the fledgling institute for one dollar. The 1 7
/8 -by-1 1 /4 inch
bookplate for the library of the Institute for Sex Research was designed
by Robert Latou Dickinson (1861–1950), a gynecologist and noted pioneer
of sex research in the United States. Dickinson's studies, including A
Thousand Marriages (1931) and The Single Woman (1934), were
based on more than fifty years in private practice with over five thousand
New York City patients and had a significant influence on later work done
by physicians, gynecologists, marriage counselors, students of fertility,
and other clinical researchers. Kinsey personally credited Dickinson as
one of the original sources of inspiration for his own work. At their
first meeting in 1943, upon learning of Kinsey's research, Dickinson
reportedly exclaimed, ‘‘At last! At last! This is what I have been
hoping and praying for all these years.'' Their friendship and
enthusiasm for each other's work prompted Dickinson's offer to design
a bookplate for Kinsey's new research group. This final design was
approved in 1946, and the ‘‘Inc.'' was added shortly thereafter
with the incorporation of the institute in 1947. The next year, the
first of the so-called ‘‘Kinsey Reports,'' Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male (W. B. Saunders, 1948) was published and became an
unexpected best seller. Five years later, Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female (W. B. Saunders, 1953) was published. Seventy-four scrapbooks
of newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, opinion pieces, reviews,
and cartoons attest to the impact of both studies on American culture.
Some clergy went so far as to call Dr. Kinsey a representative of the
devil. There were public statements that the ‘‘Kinsey Reports''
were helping to pave the way for a Communist takeover. Around the same
time, a U.S. Customs' agent began seizing sexually explicit materials
addressed to the institute. Consumed by his
research and by the effort to keep the institute afloat when foundation
funding ceased during the McCarthy era, Dr. Kinsey ignored medical advice
to slow down. He died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two. At a conference
held in honor of Dr. Kinsey's career as a sex researcher twenty-five
years after his death, the institute was renamed in his honor. The Kinsey
Institute Library houses scientific and scholarly materials from many
disciplines, erotica, and popular culture materials. The earliest artifact
in the collections dates from 3200 B.C.
There are over 80,000
books, journals, and reprints; 1,600 titles of sex magazines; 25,000
pieces of flat art; 3,500 three-dimensional objects; 40,000 photographs;
and approximately 7,000 reels of film in the collections. All materials in
the collections have been acquired as donations or have been purchased
with institute income. No public funds are used to acquire erotic
materials. Donations are vital to the development of the institute's
collections as a unique resource for use by scholars from around the
world. There have been a
number of milestones in the library's forty-year history. The first was
in 1957, when the United States District Court, Southern District of New
York, ruled that the institute could receive sexually explicit materials
for research purposes without interference by U.S. Customs and the U.S.
Postal Service. This ruling governs access to the collections. Users must
be scholars with ‘‘bona fide research projects.'' In the 1970s the
institute received funding for seven years from the National Institute of
Mental Health to set up an information service and to undertake organizing
and indexing the research literature of the multidisciplinary field of
sexology. A number of publications resulted, including book catalogs of
the monographs and periodical literature held by the library, Sexual
Nomenclature: A Thesaurus (G. K. Hall, 1976), Sex Research:
Bibliographies from the Institute for Sex Research (Oryx Press, 1979),
and Sex Studies Index, 1980 (G. K. Hall). During the 1980s Sex
Research: Early Literature from Statistics to Erotica: A Guide to the
Microfilm Collection (Research Publications, 1983) was published. The
most recent milestones are the library's new online public access
catalog, KICAT, available as a menu selection on Indiana University's
Information Online (IO) system, and its human sexuality WWW site to
support the interdisciplinary research and study of human sexuality. The
URL is http://www.indiana.edu/kinsey/. Since its
inception, the Kinsey Institute Library has attempted to collect the wide
range of materials related to sexuality needed by researchers seeking
insights into the interests and values of individuals, groups, and
cultures. The challenge inherent in this mission has probably never been
expressed better than by the Institute's founder, writing in Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male almost fifty years ago: . . . there is no
aspect of human behavior about which there has been more thought, more
talk, and more books written. From the dawn of human history ...men have
left a record of their sexual activities and their thinking about
sex....It is, at once, an interesting reflection of man's absorbing
interest in sex, and his astounding ignorance of it; his desire to know
and his unwillingness to face the facts; his respect for an objective,
scientific approach to the problems involved, and his overwhelming urge to
be poetic, pornographic, literary, philosophic, traditional, and moral. Margaret
H. Harter The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Inc. [Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 32, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 245-247.] |
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