Scholars, librarians, and collectors gathered Thursday in the Faculty Room of Low Memorial Library for a symposium addressing the future of special collections at universities. The gathering was held in honor of Jean Ashton, director of the rare book and manuscript library at Columbia University, who next month will become vice president and library director of the New-York Historical Society. Addressing a range of issues, the event was titled “Shaping Scholarship in a Changing Landscape.”

In a panel on value, research, and the market, Columbia history professor Elizabeth Blackmar,a specialist in social and urban history, discussed how some scholars become collectors of materials that do not have high market value but will have scholarly value after their work gets published.

Ms. Blackmar described the importance of two kinds of locations where special collections increasingly can be found: One is self-storage. She brought up the example of Malcolm X manuscripts turning up because one of his descendants failed to pay rent on a self-storage unit.

“What we see is more and more people, at least in Western societies, taking material from attics and garages out to self-storage facilities – I don’t need to tell you what that means for climate control.” She noted how easy it was for the ephemera of our own time to be lost in self-storage.

Ms. Blackmar then described a second institutional landscape, the off-site storage center or warehouse used by university libraries, and how both cyberspace and institutional memory can be important in accessing the materials found there.

The next speaker on that panel was a Sotheby’s vice chairman, David Redden, who said the market saved things for posterity by placing monetary value on them. He went on to describe the time, 12 years ago, that he dreamed up a sale celebrating the achievements of the Russian space program.”I called it the Russian space history sale; I went to Moscow and negotiated directly with the Russian space program. I was only interested in major artifacts central to the program.The sale was a fantastic success, and most of it ended up in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum. The sale had consequences.”

When the notebooks of the lead designer of the Vostok space capsule that Yuri Gagarin rode in brought $700,000 at auction, he said, it created “a sensation in Russia. I guarantee you, since then, every scrap of material from the Russian space program has been very carefully preserved: Russian space history is safe!”

Mr. Redden said, “Market forces also draw out materials that help to make important discoveries.” He described the time a homeowner in Los Angeles called Sotheby’s to say she had opened an old footlocker in her attic and discovered a pile of manuscripts.”We had her photocopy a few pages and fax them to us.” The papers were confirmed to be the first half of the manuscript for Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” They had Brink’s bring the papers at once to New York, and they were later reunited with the second half of the book in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

“But is the market a predictor of research value?” Mr. Redden asked. “No, not really.”

“In a market dominated by private collectors, the market will not be very good at predicting what is of greatest value to scholars,” he said, “but that is a huge opportunity for research libraries because scholarly material ought to be comparatively inexpensive.” From where he sits, he said, books and manuscripts are not expensive, “not at all!”

Mr. Redden pondered whether special collections at universities were not missing the boat: He asked why they do not take a page out of the museum playbook and mount permanent exhibitions of their treasures, bring in the masses, and inspire them, using well-known icons – “and incidentally get a whole new kind of donor.”

He lamented that America’s greatest treasures were often stored away. Speaking of the Gettysburg Address, he said there were five known copies in Lincoln’s hand: Two in the Library of Congress, one at the White House, one at Cornell, and one at the Illinois Historical Society – the only one on view.

He then brought up the first printing of the Declaration of Independence – “the most important single piece of paper in the world.” Of the 25 surviving copies, all but two are in public collections, but only four are in public view. He said, “How is it possible that the most inspiring document of our nation could be hidden so completely away from our people?”

gshapiro@nysun.com