Lyuba Basin's journey through books at the J. Willard Marriott Library stretches back to her undergraduate days, snaking through Sumerian history and blooming into a full-time vocation. Basin, who began working part-time at the library in 2012, escalated to a full-time role directing the Rare Books section in 2019. Basin's love story with rare volumes starts with the touch of ancient clay, a 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablet stirring emotions and ambitions alike. According to AtTheU, Basin reveals the emotional pull of this encounter, stating, "I got a little emotional about it."
Basin's professional tapestry is a weave of instruction and administration. Tasked with the preservation and organization of over 80,000 rare books, she has much to oversee. Yet, it's the academic facet that seems to, most deeply, resonate with her spirit. Meeting with up to 40 classes per semester, Basin curates a landscape of literature tailored sharply to each course's curriculum. In a reflection captured by AtTheU, she shared, "The majority of my work is geared toward students, teaching, and instruction." Despite the desert locale of this state university, the collection scales the heights of comprehensiveness, spanning Sumerian tablets to 21st-century artistic expressions.
Historical threads run through the library's accumulation, tracing back to its origins in 1971 and stretching even further to the 1940s with focuses on Utah and Latter-Day Saints history. The array of knowledge housed here plunges into vast territories, from the American West's sprawling narratives to Middle East literature, Mesoamerican archives, medieval scripts, and the evolution of print and science. But for Basin, the true favorites within the collection are not dictated by rarity or demand, but by their cultural and historical heft, as she told AtTheU, "I think my favorite books in the collection are not necessarily the ones that are the rarest or the most sought after, but the ones that make a big cultural or historical impact."
