by Donald W. Maxwell

In 1986, I bought a remaindered copy of David Wallechinsky's Complete Book of the Olympics. Wallechinsky was a co-author of three versions of The Book of Lists and three of The People's Almanac, which demonstrated his quirky point of view. His current titles, The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics and The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics, updated just before the celebration of the quadrennial summer and winter versions of the games, are more straightforward reference books in that they present the top eight finishers of every event of every Olympics, along with their times or distances or scores. Ever with an eye for the dramatic and unusual, however, Wallechinsky also tells some fascinating stories about the competitions in addition to the raw numbers and facts. His stories held great interest for me and inspired me to read other histories of the Olympics in addition to following them avidly on television, in printed media, and, eventually, on the Internet.

My insatiable interest in the games led to a visit, in 1994, to the Olympic Museum (le Musée Olympique) in the French-speaking, southwestern Swiss city of Lausanne, home of the International Olympic Committee, the governing body of the Olympic Games. During my visit, I was surprised and pleased to see that there was an entire library devoted to this area of interest. I thought I had found the job of my dreams and actually inquired about job opportunities, but employment was not a possibility. The museum did, however, issue me an invitation to make an extended working visit. I accepted and in the fall of 1996, I combined vacation and vocation with avocation and travelled to Switzerland to work as a visiting librarian for several weeks in the library of the Olympic Museum. My time there proved that a foreign library could be remarkably similar to libraries in the United States, yet still hold some surprises.

The Setting

The Olympic Museum has existed in various forms and in various buildings in Lausanne off and on since 1934. In its present building, completed in 1993, it enjoys a beautiful setting on the shores of Lake Geneva (called Lac Léman locally), with a breathtaking view of the Alps on 5-1/2 acres of park-like grounds sprinkled with sports-inspired sculptures. The museum has over 118,000 square feet on five floors with over 36,000 square feet of exhibit space on three of those floors. The bottom floor of the Museum houses one of the largest collections of Olympic research materials in the world in the four departments of the Olympic Studies Centre: archives of photographs, of audiovisual and multimedia items, of original documents, correspondence, and files, and a library. The library is the only one of these departments open to the public, whether or not they are paying museum visitors. Four full-time librarians, three part-time clerks, and several volunteers make up the library staff.

An Olympian Mission

The library's stated mission is "to organize, manage and make available to the public and Olympic family as complete a collection as possible, enabling them to gather information on the Olympic Movement, the Games and Olympic sports and, by extension, the scientific, legal, medical, artistic and other aspects of sport in general."

The "Olympic family" includes the 110-member International Olympic Committee, the staff of the Musée Olympique and the International Olympic Committee headquarters, as well as corporate sponsors, committees organizing future Olympic games, national Olympic committees, international sports federations, and other related organizations.

Public users of the library include scholars working on theses, dissertations, and other publications, students of all ages, teachers, librarians, journalists, professionals such as doctors, lawyers, artists, and architects, sport fans, and other occasional users from the region. Swiss residents may borrow books from the library in person. Others may borrow from the collection via interlibrary loan. There is only a small amount of circulation of materials; the library staff is still able to manage it using a manual system.

An Integral Part of the Museum

In some ways, the Olympic Museum library is a public library. It gives anyone with a curiosity about the Olympics or something in the museum a chance to explore further. Like many public libraries, this one has displays of current issues of periodicals, new books, and children's books. Display cases house small exhibits of books and other materials related to activities elsewhere in the Olympic Museum.

In most ways, however, the Olympic Museum library is a special library. Its collection of 16,000 books and 200 periodicals fulfills the library's mission by covering all aspects of sport and the Olympics. It also includes items in the areas of museum studies and library science. Unique to this library are reference collections of final reports published by cities that have held the Olympics and dossiers compiled by cities that have competed to hold them.

The public area of the library has benches for casual reading and tables for more serious work. Many volumes are available for browsing in the libre-accès (literally, free-access), or, open stacks. Others are retrievable from closed stacks--nuclear shelters, actually--that house valuable and older, even ancient, works, multiple copies, donations to and from the president of the International Olympic Committee, and other special collections.

Assistance to Scholars -- and Browsers

Public service consists mainly of circulation and directional reference: orientation to the open stacks, reference collections, and OPAC (online public access catalog) terminals, and referral to other departments of the museum. The other departments of the Olympic Studies Centre receive more serious researchers only by appointment. The librarians perceive that there is a gap between directional reference and serious research and are formulating a policy for handling reference queries that fall into this gap.

The two most commonly researched topics at the library are the operation of the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic movement in general. Researchers often seek biographical information, particularly about Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. Soccer, basketball, volleyball, and track and field are the most studied sports. Psychology, architecture, science, medicine, sociology, and nutrition are the most commonly researched general sports topics.

The museum library follows local Swiss-French business custom by closing its doors at lunch time. The museum remains open throughout the day, however. Whereas many public and academic libraries in the United States have shorter hours during the summer, the Olympic Museum library actually has longer ones--for the convenience of the larger number of tourists. From May to September, the library is open six days and 48 hours a week. During the other months, the library is only open five days and 35 hours a week.

OPAC terminals in the reading room provide access to the library's holdings through the 2 million-entry union catalog of RERO (Réseau des bibliothèques romandes et tessinoises), a group of libraries in the French- and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. In 1997, RERO switched to VTLS, an American library automation firm, for its online catalog. It is accessible via the Internet at the URL http://www.rero.ch/14/virtua/english.

Building a World Class Collection

The library staff has a generous budget with which to acquire materials. The library collection has grown tremendously in the past few years and continues to grow in order to meet the library's mission of making available as complete a collection as possible. There are many gaps in the collection that the librarians would like to fill. At the same time, they are collecting new titles as soon as they are published. Librarians monitor current collection development tools as well as catalogs from antiquarian book dealers, publishers, and other sports libraries. The library also accepts donations, of course. In fact, the library is required to keep all gifts of books given to the president of the International Olympic Committee, no matter what the subject. These well-intentioned gifts sometimes stray far from the library's mission statement.

Due to the library's international scope, librarians collect materials in many languages. English and French are the languages of all official documents of the International Olympic Committee. German, Spanish, and Italian are also prominent in the collection. Necessity dictates the acquisition of material in still other languages. For example, many publications about the ancient origins of the Olympics are in Greek--a language that will also be in use for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. One of the official languages of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona was Catalan. Norwegian was an official language of the 1994 Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer and Japanese was one for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.

Librarians catalog the collection using a form of the Dewey Decimal Classification called the Universal Decimal Classification, modified for the special needs of the library. The rapid rate at which the library is acquiring materials has, in turn, impacted cataloging, which requires a greater and greater amount of work to maintain. The open stacks are filling up. Sending more materials to the closed stacks creates a problem in their storage and retrieval.

Ancient Games Meet Modern Bibliography

Electronic resources are making an impact, too. The library has only a small collection of electronic products, namely SPORT Discus, a multilingual sports bibliography database on CD-ROM and Héraclès, its French-language equivalent. The librarians are considering the addition of more electronic products and whether or not to network them within the library, the museum, and even to the International Olympic Committee headquarters.

The library has had fairly restricted access to the Internet since February 1996. The museum administration requires that the computer used for dial-up access be kept under lock and key. There is no access to Telnet, so, unfortunately, librarians cannot view many other library catalogs for collection development ideas.

The International Olympic Committee has a World Wide Web site (http://www.olympic.org) and the Olympic Museum has a fairly large presence on that site. The library staff wants to add more content to the site in order to publicize the library's services, as well as to create web links to other useful information for its users, both on site and online. It is considering providing Internet access to museum staff and perhaps even to the public (by charging for connect time). The state of the Internet in Europe and some conservatism by the museum's administration have slowed down this activity.

There are many sports studies libraries and only a few Olympic studies libraries in the world. The library at the Musée Olympique is one among them, but it has the advantage of close proximity to, and the generous support of, the International Olympic Committee, the preeminent sports organization in the world. With its modern facilities and enhanced visibility as a part of the new Musée Olympique, it stands to move to the fore as one of the greatest research facilities of its kind in the world. It's an ideal situation in an idyllic setting.

Donald W. Maxwell is reference librarian at the Bloomington office of Indiana Cooperative Library Services Authority (INCOLSA). His e-mail address is dmaxwell@indiana.edu.