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L. Allen Smith had asked that his death be handled with as much privacy as possible. There won't even be a memorial service, says the announcement of his passing posted on the Web site of Simmons College, where he was a faculty member in the library sciences department for 30 years.

But still the blogs have been filling up with reminiscences about Prof. Smith since his death on Aug. 2 at his home in Marion. How could they not?

How could his students of library science at Simmons not tell all of cyberspace about the teacher who gave them a pithy answer for all those occasions when a patron wonders why you need a master's degree to be a librarian: "It takes a lot to gain bibliographic control over the whole universe of information." Or about the professor who showed such excitement when he got his first cyber card and who so enthusiastically encouraged his students' interest in the Internet, online databases and oral histories?

How could his former clients not tell of the loving care he gave their horses in his role as a farrier? Or about how he sailed horses for shoeing on an island off Buzzards Bay? Or how he showed up for meetings of the farriers association on a motorcycle, wearing a professorial bow tie under his leather jacket? Or how he was the unofficial peacekeeper of the farriers' association (similar to his role as unofficial parliamentarian of the Simmons faculty)?

And how could visitors to everythingdulcimer.com not pause to post a public regret about the passing of L. Allen Smith, author of "A Catalog of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers," and a giant in the field - albeit a small one - of dulcimer history. It was through this book that I came to know Prof. Smith. Patricia Figueroa, wife of Assistant Managing Editor for News Craig Borges and a Providence librarian, is a former student of Smith's and mentioned his book to me some years ago. An exchange of brief e-mails with Smith ensued and soon enough a copy of the book arrived in the mail, along with a CD containing the doctoral thesis Smith had written for the University of Leeds in Wales on which the book is based.

Introduced to the dulcimer in his boyhood in Ohio, he spent several months in the late 1970s in the Appalachian region locating dulcimers that had been constructed prior to 1940, photographing and measuring them and collecting family stories and other information on the dulcimer's background.

As much as I hate to admit it, I have spent more hours poring through the Catalog than I spent with all the Playboy, Gent and Stag magazines I leafed through in my teens. Prior to studying the book, I had always thought of the "melting pot" aspect of American life as an urban phenomenon. But if you cross-reference Smith's findings with family genealogies in areas of dulcimer concentration, the dulcimer emerges as an emblem of the melting together of German, French, Scots, Irish, English and Scandinavian cultural traditions during the grand migration down the Shenandoah Valley and the early westward expansion across the Appalachians.

Smith, I suspect, might say I've read too much into the book. It is quite simply a catalog of the pre-1940 dulcimers he had located. As such, however, it provides a statistical baseline against which future inquiries into the history of this uniquely American instrument will be interpreted.

In any event, the book was a relatively small accomplishment for a man intent on mastering biblographic control over a universe of information. That may be an impossible task, but Prof. Smith mastered the art of living timelessly - the horseshoer and dulcimer historian exhibited the utmost of respect for the past, comfort in the present and enthusiasm for the future, cyber cards, databases and all. His life was a balancing act from which we all could learn and which, despite his desire for privacy, it would be unfair to keep secret.

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.