The origins of exchange practices were briefly described in Chapters 1 and 2. This chapter goes into more detail in examining how the growth of this new activity was organised and how it spread in new areas. The core question is how it mirrored the structure of the scholarly community. Did it mitigate scientific competition and aid small societies in the peripheral countries in entering the international networks?
Before examining Finnish societies, the history of international exchange is sum-marised. Also, the alternative methods of networking and distributing publications are discussed.
Although the medieval libraries sometimes exchanged manuscripts,419 the origins of this practice should rather be sought at the dawn of modern science. The regular exchange developed from reciprocal favours, typical in the Republic of Letters. The material conditions of the seventeenth century Europe supported exchange practices.
Even booksellers acquired their stocks through exchange, since mercantilist politics, import restrictions, customs duties and the many available currencies made foreign purchases quite challenging. The international book fairs offered publishers and book-sellers an opportunity to exchange their domestic stocks with foreign representatives.
The exchange value was based on the number of sheets, while the contents of the books did not affect their worth. This practice often led to the import of books of little interest to customers.420 The private networks supplemented the supply of book-sellers. The citizens of the Republic felt free to ask travellers to buy books from other towns. Besides, it was common practice for authors to send copies of their works as gifts to friends and colleagues, which led to a remarkable volume of donations. The Republicans also opened their private libraries for their fellow researchers.421 The so-cieties and academies entered this system when they began to publish their research findings. For instance, Accademia dei Lincei appointed a librarian, whose primary duty was the distribution of copies of publications and manuscripts as gifts. This act was reciprocal in nature and may thus be considered a forerunner of the exchange
419 Gwinn 1996, p. 32.
420 Wittmann 1991, pp. 88-92.
421 Goldgar 1995, pp. 15-17; Brockliss 2002, pp. 308-315.
of publications. However, in spite of its efforts, the Accademia was not successful in assembling a library.422
At the beginning, donations between learned institutions were occasional. Not until the eighteenth century, when the number of societies and academies had increased and many of them had launched their own journals, could the regular exchange of publications begin. The initiator was the newly founded Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, which was completely dependent on foreign scholars and foreign litera-ture because, at the time, the country did not have any other scientific institutions or universities. One of its first measures was to write letters proposing correspondence, exchange of publications and co-operation in astronomical, geographical and other projects. These offers were sent to the Royal Society in London, the Academy of Sci-ences in Paris, the Societas Regia Scientiarum in Berlin and the University of Uppsala in Sweden. The first to accept the proposition was the Royal Society, which started an exchange of publications with the Russian Academy in 1729. From 1737, the Acta Li-teraria Sveciae was sent from Uppsala to Saint Petersburg.423 Yet, the regular exchange of publications was a rare phenomenon in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The Royal Society started a reciprocal exchange with the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1742, and about ten years later with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sci-ences. The Paris Academy of Sciences maintained more or less regular contacts with the provincial French academies. In this early phase, the exchange of publications was not defined as a special activity, but regarded as part of wider co-operation between societies. These new relations were known by various names, for example, philosophical correspondence or commerci epistolici which, rather than being merely the exchange of publications, referred to writing letters or to co-operation in general. Not only books and journals, but also instruments and natural specimens were donated. Often the contacts were originated and maintained by individual scientists and it is hard to determine how much the societies were actually involved in these arrangements.424
From the 1740s, contacts between academies and societies increased and many new exchange relations were created. The Paris Academy started to send its Mémoires to London and Saint Petersburg. The Royal Society enlarged the list of the recipients of the Philosophical Transactions to societies and academies in Berlin, Göttingen, Madrid, Bologna, Nuremberg and Wittenberg. The Swedish Academy established exchanges with the academies of Saint Petersburg and Bologna, the newly founded Dutch Society of Sciences with the Royal Society and Paris Academy, etc. As regards the large national scientific institutions, only the Berlin Academy, which was under the tight control of Frederick II, remained isolated. The first American society entered the scene in 1770, when Benjamin Franklin exported eleven copies of the first volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society for distribution to the most important societies and scientists in Europe. Gradually, exchange relations became routine for most academies and societies. Exchange agreements, like diplomatic rela-tions, connected societies, creating regular channels for the distribution of scientific
422 Gibson 1982, p. 146.
423 McClellan 1985, pp. 155-158; Graham 1993, pp. 17-20.
424 McClellan 1985, pp. 159-167.
news. It generated a new type of library – the society library, which was available for the members of the societies, and sometimes even for a wider audience.425
Also, the university libraries needed new acquisition methods. In the seventeenth century, they were often depositories of old and valuable books and various curios-ities, but the Enlightenment libraries aimed at systematically selected and catalogued book collections which could aid researchers to base their studies on current and valid information. The University of Göttingen was at the forefront of this development, but it differed from other institutions because it had exceptionally good funding. In other libraries, acquisitions budgets were dependent upon student fines or fees, and the collections were mostly accumulated en bloc by donations, bequests and spoils of war.426 Swedish universities were the forerunners in organising the exchange of publications. In 1745, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Uppsala, Jacob Ben-zelius, suggested that thirty copies of each academic publication should be reserved for exchange. This exchange circle, called commercium literarium, started between the universities of Uppsala, Lund, Turku and Greifswald. At the beginning, the publications were to be distributed to the professors, not to the libraries. Gradually, however, the university libraries became the depositories of the exchange material and the distribution of the publications was transferred to the library staff.427 The Swedish example was soon followed and in 1817, German universities organised an association called Akademischer Tauschverein. Initially, it was meant to include only German universities, but when the word spread, universities from Russia, Poland, Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia joined, and the number of copies to deliver rose to 50. It is no wonder that the entry of eighteen French universities caused disbandment of the Tauschverein. The number of exchange copies required was too high for small universities, not to mention the doctoral candidates who paid for the printing. Nevertheless, many individual exchange relations between univer-sities continued into the twentieth century.428
The exchange networks were still far from extensive. In the first half of the nine-teenth century, much of the effort to develop the exchange of publications was due to one man – Alexandre Vattemare, a famous French actor and ventriloquist. On his tours around Europe, he established a wide range of contacts. Visiting libraries and museums, he observed that many held valuable copies of local literature, whereas their foreign collections were modest. At first, he helped private collectors to exchange items abroad, but as his reputation spread, he began to receive exchange lists from the direc-tors of museums all over Europe. Encouraged by the support he had from many sci-entists, artists and government officials, Vattemare planned to establish an exchange office in Paris and turned to the French government for support. It was not interested, but he did not give up. In 1839, he travelled to New York and organised public meet-ings there to propagate the idea of exchange, emphasising that the Americans, who
425 McClellan 1985, pp. 169-178; Gwinn 1996, pp. 23-24; Wyatt 1997, pp. 191-194.
426 Clark W. 2000, pp. 190-193, 196-200; Harris 1984, pp. 130-137; Vallinkoski 1948, pp. 178-181, 185-204.
427 Bring 1929, pp. 130-131; Vallinkoski 1975, pp. 146-148.
428 Zur Geschichte des akademischen Tauschvereins, pp. 471-473; Jörgensen (1930) 1980, pp. 114-115; Bring 1929, pp. 131-132; Vanwijngarden 1978, pp. 16-17.
had a shorter history of publishing, could also use natural specimens, fossils or patents as exchange material. He succeeded in convincing the United States Government. In July 1840, a bill was signed into law authorising the Librarian of Congress to exchange duplicates. Fifty additional copies of Congressional documents were to be printed for the purpose of foreign exchange. Furthermore, Vattemare established exchanges with several states, city corporations, educational institutions and learned societies, even in Canada and Cuba. In his home country, his reputation as a cultural ambas-sador did not arouse admiration. In 1847, he travelled to America, again. This time he managed to persuade the Congress to grant duty-free imports for his European materials and the Joint Committee of the Library appointed him as its international exchange agent. However, his success was on the wane. During his visit, there was revolution in France, followed by the new regime of the Second Empire. The new French government approached the Librarian of Congress, insisting that the official publications should be exchanged through diplomatic channels. Congress repealed the authorising act for Vattemare’s agency in 1852. As a result, he had difficulties finding enough material and gradually even lost the exchange agreements with other American institutions. The American Civil War was the final blow to his activities.429
Vattemare was a fascinating character, connecting, on the one hand, the old virtues of the Republic and, on the other hand, contemporary efforts to make international agreements. However, even before his death in 1864, a new phase in the history of exchange had begun. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed increasing publishing and the establishment of a variety of scientific institutions. The public administrators and legislators in various countries were in need of information, such as statutes, statistics and reports, at a time when the old European system of hier-archy was losing its stability.430 A solution for the information needs was founding the national exchange centres. The first of these, the Smithsonian Institution, was established in Washington in 1846, with the capital bequeathed by an Englishman, James Smithson. Its programme was to publish works, award grants and dissemi-nate knowledge by exchanging publications with other institutions. It began with its own Contributions, but soon, it forwarded publications from other American learned institutions and the official publications of the Congress. The right to ship publica-tions duty-free, the effective procedures of packing, lucrative contracts with shipping companies and the network of agencies in various countries made it a model for an efficiently functioning exchange organisation. It became apparent that similar agencies were needed in other countries, too. In 1875, the International Congress of Geographical Sciences in Paris considered these problems and, as a result, exchange services were established in France, Portugal, Switzerland, Russia and Belgium. In the United Kingdom, Her Majesty's Stationary Office was given responsibility for the distribution of British official publications and the British Museum was to collect and catalogue publications received through exchange.431
429 Gibson 1982, pp. 153-154; Armbruster 1997, pp. 132-134, 137-147; Gwinn 1996, pp. 97-149.
430 Lilja 2006, p. 55; Gwinn 1996, pp. 162-163. Th e contemporaries described Vattemare as a con- Lilja 2006, p. 55; Gwinn 1996, pp. 162-163. The contemporaries described Vattemare as a con-solidator of the Republic of Letters. See Gwinn 2010, p. 110.
431 Gwinn 1996, pp, 194-198, 208-209, 221, 227-232, 242-249; Gibson 1982, p. 155; Lilja 2006, pp.
55-56; Harris 1998, pp. 348-353.
The idea behind the exchange centres was to avoid the weakness of Vattemare's one-man scheme by decentralising the responsibility to national agencies. Neverthe-less, the need for international agreements was still obvious. The first international conventions regulating the exchange of publications were established in Brussels in 1886. Convention A for the International Exchange of Official Documents, Scientific and Literary Publications declared that each contracting state should establish an exchange bureau. The exchange arrangements and shipments should be made between the bu-reaux, and each state should assume the expenses of packing and transportation. They could also serve in a non-official capacity as intermediaries between learned bodies and literary and scientific societies, but in such cases, their duty would be confined to the free transmission of the exchange material. The bureaux did not have permission to take initiative to create new exchange relations, so not to infringe the freedom and independence of science. Convention B for the Immediate Exchange of Official Journals, Public Parliamentary Annals and Documents declared that the respective governments should undertake to transmit to the legislative chambers of each contracting state a copy of the official journal and of parliamentary annals and documents. Both conven-tions were signed by Belgium, Brazil, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, the United States of America, Argentina and Paraguay. Switzerland signed only Convention A.432 The Conventions indicated an international willingness to co-operate in exchange. Yet, this did not create a worldwide arrangement because important countries like France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom never adhered to them. In fact, most of the signatories had difficulty abiding by the provisions of the Conventions. International exchange was also developed in countries which had not signed the Conventions. For instance, many Latin American countries founded exchange centres in connection with their national libraries. New conventions were signed before World War I, and most were based upon bilateral cultural agreements between governments with an exchange programme of official publications. The first regional multilateral conven-tion was the Inter-American Convenconven-tion signed in Mexico in 1902, in order to further mutual understanding and closer ties between Latin countries.433
The Brussels conventions were established at a time when progress was being made in the international organisation of science and scholarship. The need to coordinate a more unified methodology, terminology and documentation promoted the organ-ising of congresses and the founding of international associations. Whereas, in the 1850s, there were one or two international science congresses; in the 1870s, there were a dozen, and in the 1890s, there were about thirty.434 Besides the centralised interna-tional systems, the number of individual exchanges between learned bodies increased.
These were still usually based on informal correspondence between institutions and societies. Various indices and catalogues aided in finding new exchange partners.
According to the old ideals of science, the Brussels conventions left the freedom of exchange initiative to scientific institutions, which meant that the individual scientific societies could respond to their own position in these markets.435
432 Lilja 2006, pp. 56-57. The text of the Brussels Conventions is published in Busse 1964, pp. 61-62.433 Lilja 2006, pp. 57-58.
434 Schröder 1966, pp. 168-175; Rasmussen 1990, pp. 120-126; Somsen 2008, pp. 365-366.
435 Lilja 2006, pp. 57-58; Gibson 1982, pp. 153, 155-156 ; MacDonald 2005, p. 280.