Changing Patterns of Scholarship and the Future of Research Libraries: A Symposium in Celebration of the 2th Anniversary of the Establishment of the University of Pennsylvania Library 9781512816921

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CHANGING SCHOLARSHIP

PATTERNS AND

OF RESEARCH

THE

OF FUTURE

LIBRARIES

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1951

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Manufactured

in the United

States

COMMENTARY

ON

TOPICS

D i s t r i b u t e d t o Speakers in A d v a n c e of the M e e t i n g

P A T T E R N S OF R E S E A R C H AND CHANGING L I B R A R Y

NEEDS

Patterns of research are constantly changing with an inevitable effect upon library requirements. There is n persistent growth in the number of scholars and in the volume of scholarly output. There is persistent expansion and fluctuation in the fields of inquiry. There is a trend toward greater and greater specialization, yet this is countered by a trend toward the development of borderline research in overlapping fields !>etween disciplines and by the increasing urgency of attempts at larger syntheses. Also fashions change in scholarship, as elsewhere—e.g., the supplanting of the linguistic and philological approach to the study of ancient culture by the archaeological and anthropological. Large segments of research libraries sometimes fall into near disuse. T H E F.VER E X P A N D I N G D E M A N D FOR M A T E R I A L S AND T H E T H R E A T E N E D D E C L I N E OK S U P P O R T HOW SHALL T H E GAP BE F I L L E D ?

Research libraries have grown in response to demands which may be expected to continue and indeed to increase. Their growth is absorbing an ever increasing proportion of the revenues of the institutions and organizations that maintain them. The gap is therefore xoidening between the respoiisibilities which it seems to be their duty to assume and the resources which they have available with which to carry those responsibilities. Are there other resources which may f>c made available—e.g., by industry through a broad [v]

COMMENTARY

ON

TOPICS

view of its own interest, or by the federal or state government to assist with acquisitions recognized to be in the national interest? What of the value and shortcomings of cooperation as an added resource? T H E R E S E A R C H L I B R A R Y IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y

SOCIETY

A P R O B L E M O F T H E P R O P E R RECOGNITION O F SERVICES RENDERED

Research libraries now play a role of sufficiently vital importance for the public good to require that they command the attention and understanding of men in the highest echelons of public leadership; yet they fail to acquire this attention, perhaps because they are in the hands of competent specialists who have failed to make the necessary contact with the highest leadership of public opinion. The impressive sum total of the contribution of libraries to education and research seems to be composed of many small instances of service, none, or few, of which are sufficiently spectacular to command public attention. Can the necessary expression of appreciation and demand for support be obtained through organized groups of users? THE

B A L A N C E O F C O N F L I C T I N G I N T E R E S T S IN THF. BUILDING OF COLLECTIONS C O M P R E H E N S I V E N E S S VERSUS S E L E C T I V I T Y

Libraries, like other expressions of our culture, have responded to the concept of quantitative measurement— the acquisition of the greatest number of books for the greatest number of users. Yet ought not the core of our effort be directed to getting the right book into the hands of the right person at the right moment—to giving quality service of important materials to those who are qualified to profit from them? We doubtless have no right to exclude [vi]

COMMENTARY

ON

TOPICS

the less gifted or the less well-equipped from the use of our collections; but should our program of acquisition and service be geared to the mass interest to the extent which now prevails? Much of current demand is for materials which in retrospect will be seen to be of ephemeral value. To what extent should they be collected and preserved at the expense of other materials of more lasting value? How is the decision to be made between serving the demanding present and building for the future? L I B R A R I E S AND S C H O L A R S H I P S H O U L D L I B R A R I E S B E PASSIVE I N S T R U M E N T S

OF,

OR A C T I V E P A R T I C I P A N T S IN, R E S E A R C H ?

The supreme end of librarianship can be the acquisition, organization, and recording of the materials of research, together with the service which makes them readily accessible—a passive role in short. But it is also possible to go further, to do all this and also to play an active role as a coordinator of projects of research and as a participant in them. Which is the sounder policy? WHAT

TYPE

RESEARCH

LIBRARIAN?

Should research librarians be scholars whose minds have been conditioned by long experience in research and should they be encouraged to participate actively in research? Or should they be administrators, highly competent in the organization of large and expensive enterprises (men who "can get things done")? Or should they be technicians, expert in the minutiae of technical processes? Or, finally, should they be primarily promoters? As an afterthought, should they perhaps be educators? Director of Editor.

CHARLES W . DAVID, R U D O L F HIRSCH,

[vii]

Libraries

CONTENTS OPENING

REMARKS

3 4

George Wharton Pepper Charles W. David THE William

LIBRARY

Rex Crawford,

PATTERNS

OF

RESEARCH

From

the

Viewpoint

AND CHANGING of the

Humanities

of

Natural

MODKRATOR LIBRARY and

NEEDS

Social

Sciences

7

Crane Brinton From

the

Viewpoint

the

Sciences

12

Conway Zirkle DISCUSSION

Ralph A. lleals George Evelym Hutchinson THE

E V E R EXPANDING THREATENED THE G A P B E

18 22

D E M A N D I OR M A T E R I A L S AND T H E

DECLINE

or

SUPPORT:

HOW

SHAM,

FILLED?

27

Keyes D. Mctcnlf DISCUSSION

3fi 40

Luther H. Evans Alfred H. Williams THE

RESEARCH A

LIBRARY

PROULKM

SERVICES

OF

IN THE

CONTEMPORARY PROPER

SOCIETY:

RECOGNITION

or

RENDERED

43

Carl M. White DISCUSSION

Kurt Peiscr Louis B. Wright

[ix]

54 58

CONTENTS

THE

INTELLECTUAL

Carroll C. Moreland, THE

PROCESS MODERATOR

B A L A N C E OF C O N F L I C T I N G INTERESTS IN T H E ING OF C O L L E C T I O N S :

COMPREHENSIVENESS

BUILDVERSUS

SELECTIVITY

Verner W. Clapp Ralph E. Ellsworth

f>5 73

DISCUSSION

Albert C. Baugh Donald Coney LIBRARIES

AND

79 8(>

SCHOLARSHIP:

SIVE INSTRUMENTS

OF,

SHOULD OR ACTIVE

LIBRARIES

BE

PAS-

PARTICIPANTS

IN.

RESEARCH?

Harry M. Lydenberg

90

DISCUSSION

Conyers Read Warner G. Rice WHAT

TYPE

RESEARCH

Louis Round

98 102 LIBRARIAN?

Wilson

112

DISCUSSION

Charles Harvey Brown Donald F. Cameron

123 130

[*J

Proceedings of the Symposium First Session Held May 8, 1951

THE

LIBRARY Moderator

W I L L I A M R E X CRAWFORD,

Professor

of Sociology,

University

of

Pennsylvania

OPENING

REMARKS

T h e Chairman of the Trustees Board of Libraries will now open our Bicentennial Celebration: Senator Pepper. G E O R G E W H A R T O N P E P P E R : Mr. Director, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: T o me has been accorded the signal privilege of calling this significant meeting to order. I think of it as a high privilege, because it is not often that one who is himself a mere lover of books can meet on equal terms with those who know all about them, assembling them, evaluating them, tenderly caring for them, and making them available for general and specialized use. And I think of this meeting as significant because we have met logether to observe the 200th Anniversary of the Founding of the Library of this University and to take counsel together respecting the contributions that this institution and similar institutions can best make to the intellectual development and the social welfare of this Republic of ours. CHARLES

W.

DAVID:

Those of you who saw me assisted up those high steps to the platform may have guessed that this honor is conferred upon me because I am almost co-eval with the founders of the Library. But that is not the fact. It is, as Director David has said, due to the circumstance that for the time being I am Chairman of the Board of Libraries of this University. As such, it has been thought that I have some sort of an official right to take part in this birthday party. Not since the time many years ago, when it was my good [3]

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fortune to be Chairman of the Congressional Committee having jurisdiction over the Library of Congress, have I experienced precisely the thrills that I hope to experience during the sessions of this body. I say that in all sincerity because it was then my good fortune to work in double harness with that remarkable man Herbert Putnam, while now I find myself once more among men of whom my good friend Julian Boyd has recently said that they are more aware of the total problem of the relationship between the scholar and all of the resources of scholarship than anybody else in the academic world. We call our meeting a symposium. In college and since, I have had an almost passionate interest in Greek language and literature and for me a symposium means only the sort of occasion that I learned about from the reading of Plato. You remember that he vividly describes an occasion when all the participants talked and talked until they talked themselves out, and how all of them except Socrates drank themselves under the table. How far this meeting will conform to the platonic type I do not know, but I think it is safer to be ready for all eventualities and I am going to take the precaution of drafting for service the Director of our libraries here at the University, because he can hold up his end in any discussion likely to take place and, I suspect, that his head is as steady as was the head of Socrates himself. So I turn over this meeting to my dear friend and fellow worker, Mr. Charles W . David. CHARLES W . D A V I D : It is now my pleasant duty to welcome you all—members of the panel, librarian and scholar

[4]

OPENING

REMARKS

colleagues, and guests—to the opening feature of our Library Bicentennial Celebration which my good friend Senator Pepper has so graciously and impressively launched. It is also my duty to introduce briefly this Symposium. As most of you know, I am one of those strange creatures who changed horses in mid-stream, fortunately without apparent disaster. Having been a teacher and a mediaevalist for more than half a lifetime, I had a long-standing interest in books and in libraries, not from the technical viewpoint of the professionally trained librarian, but from the viewpoint of the scholar who has spent a good part of his life in libraries. T o me the change from historical research and teaching to librarianship seemed less revolutionary and disturbing than might have been the case, had I not experienced a kind of indoctrination through long connection with the Union Library Catalogue of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area which brought me into direct contact with many librarians and library problems. Now, in retrospect over more than a decade, I realize that I had much to learn when I entered my new profession; but with that learning there has come an even deeper appreciation of the place which libraries and librarianship occupy, or ought to occupy, in the world of learning and in our modern society. Also I have become profoundly conscious of the great and intricate problems with which both scholarship and research librarianship are confronted as we enter the second half of the present century. I therefore phrased the subject for this conference in the terms which lie before you in the

[5]

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printed program, and still being something of a mediaeval is t even after ten years of the active directing of these libraries here at the University, I chose the time-honored form of the disputatio as the most appropriate vehicle for this occasion. Though in the end the disputation was arranged by long distance telephone during a single difficult week, and though very little time has been allowed the participants to prepare themselves, the Symposium itself has been in the planning stage for a good part of a year, and I have had the benefit of the counsel of many friends and colleagues, most of whom are present this afternoon. T o them and to all our speakers I offer my most sincere thanks. With that brief introduction I propose to turn the Symposium over to the Moderator for the afternoon, Dr. Rex Crawford of our Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

[6 I

PATTERNS

OF RESEARCH

CHANGING

LIBRARY

AND

NEEDS

From the Viewpoint of the Humanities and Social Sciences

»X«CRANE

BRINTON*

I

TAKE it that I am here to give what the economist would call an estimate of immediate future demanddemand on library facilities by scholars in the humanities and in the social sciences. I can only say that that demand seems to me likely to continue to be what it is now—almost infinite, wholly elastic. We shall take what you give us, and always ask for more. But in the first place let me say that, as for what librarians as technicians can do for us, I think we ought not to make further demands. They have done a magnificent job. In fact, as a man now aging into conservatism, I sometimes think that, from the point of view of the good of the neophyte, American librarians have made it too easy to do research. Perhaps the neophyte needs a little more hardening, a few weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale, for instance. But although I should not ask this of the librarians as such, I should like to suggest as a sort of general demand from the learned world, a revival of the unfortunately • McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, Harvard University.

[7]

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short-lived Social Science Abstracts of the twenties and early thirties. If it were at all possible to reinstitute this publication, we should have a most useful tool for further research. I do not think that in the humanities one needs to make such a demand. There is something almost too cold, and scholarly in the bad sense, in a title like "Humanities Abstracts." But now as to the demand for materials from workers in the social sciences and the humanities. First, and a bit awkward to bring out in these days when we are all so worried about the collapse of civilization amidst atom bombs and worse, I should like to suggest that if we do surmount the present international crisis, we are likely to come face to face with conditions that have also worried prophets of doom—I mean a world in which relatively few man-hours of labor, evenly distributed, will make it possible, indeed necessary, to face the problem of what human beings are going to do with their leisure. Please do not accuse me of cynicism if I say frankly that under good living conditions many people are going to be attracted to a pursuit as full of prestige and as apparently unwearing (look at our longevity) as scholarship. Seriously, I think it is clear that given roughly the present distribution of human temperament, even in our supposedly unintellectual United States, you will find a lot of men and women eager to do research in the humanities and in the social sciences. Their work may not be of earthshaking importance, and it may well encounter the disapproval of the Abraham Flexners of the future. But unless some authority in our society decides what may be done [8]

RESEARCH AND CHANGING LIBRARY

NEEDS

and what may not be done—and I take it it is in general the assumption of this Symposium that at least in matters cultural there will be no such authoritarian procedure—then I think it clear that there will continue to be much research, research aimed at the Ph.D., and even higher. Numerically, quantitatively, the human demand on you will go up. Now there are those who maintain that at any rate new research in these fields will be given a new direction, so that librarians may at least calculate that "traditional" scholarly research will diminish somewhat, and that therefore the pressure will be a bit reduced from one quarter, anyway. I suppose, to be concrete, that these prophets mean that fewer people will study subjects like "The Influence of Rousseau on English Romantic Poetry." Actually, I am not at all sure they are right. I am more inclined to believe that, though there are unquestionably waves of fashion in scholarship, though at present the wave is moving still toward social significance and away from towers of all kinds, especially those of ivory, there is a constant in the study of men in society and in the study of literature and the arts. This constant is substantially that of old-fashioned narrative history and old-fashioned literary scholarship and criticism. I think no librarian can, if he remains the conscientious and not too censorious supplier of the scholar's wants, neglect this constant demand. He will have to keep up with everything on Keats and Shelley, on memoirs of historical persons, on classical scholarship—on everything our grandfathers thought important. No new spiritual

[9]

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equivalent of motorcars will wholly kill off spiritual equivalents of horses. It is, however, quite true that in our own time there has been a movement away from the traditional scholarship, toward what is rather oddly called the new history (which is really as old as Herodotus), toward the new criticism (which seems to me born immemorially old), and—perhaps more significant for our problems today—toward an attempt to get as great a range of concrete facts as possible on which to test concepts, hypotheses, ideas about human behavior and about what human beings find the beautiful and the good to be. Once more to be concrete: the historian has increasingly in this country, since the Columbia school first preached the new history thirty years ago, been actively interested not only in the traditional account of political and military matters, not only in economic and political institutions, but in what I once rather brashly called "past everything." The scholar continues to be interested—or at any rate, as I have just pointed out, someone continues to be interested—in politics and war; but the new interest goes to what men have worn, what they have eaten, what amusements they had, what went on in their heads and hearts. This interest is not confined to the activities of the great men and women who were once almost the sole subject of history; it extends to the activities of all kinds of human beings. Therefore, the scholar will not like it if you find that dime novels, Buffalo Bill, Godey's Lady's Book, old Sears Roebuck catalogues, out-of-date textbooks, and such material are an indecent cluttering of

[10]

RESEARCH AND CHANGING LIBRARY

NEEDS

your shelves. They want all this, and, being scholars, more too. I need hardly point out that—again whether we like it or not—this interest in what once seemed too trivial, too tenth-rate, too meaningless, really, for the scholar, extends into the fields of literary scholarship too. Even on academic grounds, it is hard now to distinguish between those who teach American history and those who teach American literature. They are both interested in Emerson—and in the rural press of Buncombe County and in great-grandfather's letters, even though great-grandfather was too unimportant to make the biographical dictionaries. It is material of this latter sort, for instance, that made Mr. Conrad Richter's admirable trilogy possible. There are some faint signs that the social scientists proper—if proper is the word—that is, sociologists, economists, applied and social anthropologists, psychologists, have reached and passed the peak of their devotion to the "field" and their concomitant scorn of the "library," that in fact they are going to do openly what they have really done all along—read a lot of books. There may well be an attempt to test from historical materials some of the hypotheses of these social sciences. A sociologist turned historian would indeed be intellectually omnivorous. Thus there is a new demand added to an old demand that shows no signs of slackening. The new demand may be described very roughly as a demand for materials that in the past did not attain the dignity of "literature," for fugitive writings, for obscure local newspapers, for much that

["]

THE

LIBRARY

in the eyes of many of us brought up on aspirations toward the beautiful and the good is trivial, trash or worse. That demand, I repeat, I personally think you ought to do your best to satisfy, first because it is a genuine demand from honest and earnest scholars; and second because behind the demand is the hope that somehow we may learn more about what makes homo sapiens—not just homo sapiens varietatis scholasticus—behave as he does. May I conclude by underscoring the obvious; these materials cannot possibly be amassed and stored much longer exclusively in the form of the printed page, the printed and bound volume, as we know them.

PATTERNS

OF RESEARCH LIBRARY

AND

CHANGING

NEEDS

From the Viewpoint of the Natural Sciences CONWAY

ZIRKLE*

I am glad that the subtitle of this portion of the Symposium was originally "Basic statement of principles or problems," because this title invites those of us who have no principles to speak of to produce our problems. The problems as far as the sciences are concerned are, of course, of our own making, but the task of meeting them and of solving them to the satisfaction of all belongs to the • Professor of Botany, University of Pennsylvania.

[12]

RESEARCH AND CHANGING LIBRARY

NEEDS

librarians. Undoubtedly the most favorable time for presenting our problems to the librarians is when they are in the mood of celebrants. So on this occasion we may tell them the worst, but expect from them the best; they are now giving us an opening and we should take every advantage of it. In brief, the cause of our problems is simple. It is the fact that scientific knowledge is increasing at an absolutely unprecedented rate. This growth for the past couple of centuries seems to have been exponential. An exponential growth curve is one, of course, that cannot be extended indefinitely in anything concerning human affairs, but, as the accumulation of knowledge at present shows no sign of slackening, we are justified in extrapolating the curve somewhat, certainly for the next few years, perhaps even for the next century. As all the data published by scientists immediately become the charge of librarians, we can assure them that, difficult as their tasks are now, they will become much more difficult in the future. The younger librarians will almost certainly look back on the present time as an age of ease and leisure, when worries were trivial and budgets reasonable. Perhaps it will not be amiss to present here a quantitative evaluation of the growth of science as it affects libraries. About 40,000 scientific papers are published each year in the field of biology alone. Even more papers are published each year in chemistry. When we add to these the contributions in mathematics, physics, geology, astronomy, psychology and physical anthropology, the total number is [13]

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not less than 150,000, perhaps as many as 200,000, if we include the papers which shade off into the unimportant and repetitive. The mere storing of the periodicals which contain this volume of contributions is becoming difficult. When we add to this approximately 5,000 scientific books of merit which appear each year, and when we consider that a number of the periodicals and books must be purchased in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate, etc., and that these be stored at strategic points on the university campus, we can readily understand that the problems of housing and cataloguing the acquisitions, and of paying for them, are becoming pressing. But beyond these merely material needs there are arising more fundamental questions whose answers are perhaps even more difficult. The skill and ingenuity of the librarians are going to be tested. How is this material going to be kept available to the scientists? How will they be able to find what they want? We must remember that data which are not available might just as well be not in existence. In the past there have been a number of well-tested library aids which scientists have used, aids whose worth is beyond question, but unfortunately some of these can no longer function. T o illustrate—we may cite the Royal Society of London's Catalogue of Scientific Papers. This is an excellent reference work for any nineteenth century contribution in a periodical, if we know the name of the author. It is invaluable for research in the history of science, but its limitations are obvious. It listed, for example, the classical work of [14]

RESEARCH

AND C H A N C I N G

LIBRARY

NEEDS

Gregor Mendel on plant hybridization some nineteen years after it had been published. But this citation did not help at all in the rediscovery of Mendel's epoch-making work. Listing a paper under the name of Mendel really meant nothing when Mendel's name meant nothing. It is nice to know, however, that Mendel's paper was listed in the Catalogue. When the attempt was made to extend into the twentieth century even the limited services which the Royal Society's Catalogue rendered for the nineteenth, it broke down completely and was abandoned. In addition, numerous other aids, excellent for their times, no longer serve us for the present. As an example, we may cite Pritzel's Thesaurus which lists and describes nearly all of the books on botany which were published before the middle of the nineteenth century; but no such work lists those published during the last hundred years. I do not wish to minimize in the least such invaluable published library catalogues as those of the British Museum and the Library of Congress. Library research without these tools would not get very far. We cannot, however, leaf through the pages of hundreds of such volumes looking for works on a single subject. The many volumes of the Index-Catalogue of the Army Medical Library are, of course, without peer. Here the subject index makes life easy for those who use it, but alas this catalogue has been abandoned. We still have the Library of Congress cards and these, when purchased in adequate numbers and filed under many heads and subheads, may guide us toward our goals. [15]

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Perhaps we should get more such cards and build larger catalogue rooms, because any system of arranging books on the shelves will have defects and these deficiencies must, in the very nature of things, become more glaring as knowledge advances. Copious cross references in the card catalogues, however, should correct to some extent the systematic inadequacies of cataloguing. It is easy now for us to find certain rather humorous lapses, which we need not cite, in the Dewey Decimal Classification system and even in the Library of Congress system, but, unless we are perfectionists and rather far gone in that academic disease, we can still use these systems without irritation and with much profit. We are still able to find many leads when we browse intelligently. For periodical literature we have the abstracting journals. Biological Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts are major undertakings. Biological Abstracts alone covers 2,500 periodicals in full, with occasional papers abstracted from another 1,000. The total cost of journals which abstract the natural and physical sciences is more than a million and a half dollars a year. Abstracting services are now a necessity but, as time passes, they will need to be greatly augmented. Their annual indices, though often greatly delayed, are still fairly convenient, but cumulative indices will become necessary as the century advances. Cumulative indices at ten-year, fifty-year and hundred-year intervals are indicated, but this project, costly and laborious as it will become, will probably be saved to relieve unemployment in some future major depression. [16]

RESEARCH

AND C H A N G I N G

LIBRARY

NEEDS

Thus far I have spoken about the role of the library and librarians in helping the scientists in the immediate task of keeping us up to date, in helping them fit their discoveries into the general body of knowledge, and thus in the promotion of the overall growth of science. This activity results, of course, in making life harder for the librarians. There is another aspect of the problem, however, more in keeping with the librarian's tastes. Scientists will have to be taught how to use a library. Some of them have already discovered the library and are showing signs of being interested. Some are already convinced that science should become a part of our humanistic tradition and that the humanities can enrich any life. Good science has humanistic aspects, and a real rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities is long overdue. T h e history of science seems to be the first meeting ground of scientists and humanists and, if a scholar is to pursue this discipline to advantage, he must learn the rudiments of library research. Few scientists realize that library research is actually a form of scientific research and, thanks to the tools devised by librarians, research in this field of history is both easy and pleasant. Most scientists will be startled to discover that it is easier to pursue research in the history of the science of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than of the science of the twentieth century. T h e tools for research in the history of the former exist, but the overwhelming complexity of the almost innumerable modern sciences demands new tools, which have yet to be invented. We may

[17]

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hope that the librarians will call on their experience and help design these new and much needed devices. Finally, we may express the hope that, in some glorious future, a halt will occur in the continuous splintering of learning into smaller and smaller segments, a fragmentation which is our major handicap in understanding the times in which we live. We may also hope that successful efforts will be made to unite the fragments of knowledge into some understandable whole, and that the facilities will not then be lacking for a civilized integration of knowledge. T h e semi-literate specialists may continue to make interesting discoveries which, in this Utopia, will be fitted at once into the general picture so that the mosaic which emerges will be an entity in its own right. Meanwhile, the librarians, as custodians of all of our bits of knowledge and of all of our tentative constructions, must find ways of making what we want available to us when we want it, even though we do not know just what it is that we do want. DISCUSSION A. B E A L S : * I should like to hark back to the first sentence in Mr. Zirkle's paper. "I am glad that the subtitle of this portion of the Symposium was originally 'Basic statement of principles or problems,' because this title invites those of us who have no principles to speak of to produce our problems." I am not entirely sure what Mr. Zirkle meant. As a temporary spokesman for the RALPH

• Director, T h e New York Public Library.

[18]

RESEARCH AND CHANGING

LIBRARY

NEEDS

library profession, I am clear that our central problem is the very absence of the principles to which Mr. Zirkle alludes. There is nothing more exhilarating than to enter the reading room of a great library on a busy day when hundreds of persons are busily engaged in some form of intellectual activity. But there is nothing more frustrating than to attempt to account to anyone, most especially to oneself, for what it is they are doing, how they are doing it or why. Princes of the cloth or of the blood or of finance have sometimes undertaken the collection of great and precious stores of books and manuscripts for the sheer joy of collection and ownership but our research libraries of the present are clearly instruments toward some other end. What that is I can describe only by some such term as the "diffusion and advancement of knowledge." The "advancement of knowledge" is intangible and the intellectual process is invisible. Until we have some systematic body of principles to explain and account for this greatest mystery of all mysteries, our problems will be insoluble. Mr. Brinton referred to the fact that there are unquestionably waves of fashion in scholarship. I sometimes think that they are as capricious as the waves of fashion which govern trends in women's hats. If one looks at the research library of this year in relation to the research library at the turn of the century, there are certain unmistakable differences some of which we certainly should facilitate, some of which we should resist. Numerically, Mr. Brinton said, and quantitatively the human demand on research [19]

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libraries will go up. Judged in terms of what has happened in the last half-century he is undoubtedly right. He is probably right in his main explanation that under good living conditions many people are going to be attracted to a pursuit as full of prestige as scholarship. But I suspect that there is an even more active and urgent reason which has produced this large change quantitatively to date and will continue to do so—namely, the desire of more and more persons for higher and higher standards of living. The fact that the universities for half a century have been busily training more undergraduates in the intelligent use of the printed page is only one of the many explanations to account for the fact that in the practical affairs of everyday living more and more people are doing exactly the same kind of things with the same kind of library materials that the university scholars are doing; but, that they are necessarily engaged in scholarship or even at times in investigation, I think no one would be disposed to assume. The fact remains, however, that the demand in terms of persons is certainly mounting and bids fair to rise even faster, it would seem to me, in the next half-century in comparison with what we have seen in the past. Mr. Zirkle referred, I thought quite pleasantly, to the continuous splintering of learning into smaller and smaller segments. If one compares the catalogue of this or any other great university today with the catalogue of the year 1900, that process is clear. There has been a splintering indeed. Whole new families of studies that were wholly unknown in 1900 are represented now by departments or schools or [20]

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AND CHANGING

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colleges. And within the various departments and schools advanced seminars are offered on subjects, many of which had not been invented in the year 1900. In addition to the multiplication of disciplines by division, there has been a conscious crossing producing hybrids like bio-mathematics, bio-chemistry, bio-physics, bio-mechanics. A new phenomenon, which, so far as I know, has as yet no name, is represented by the appointment of "university professors" or "professors at large" who are engaged in pursuits which, although neither aimless nor random, do not fit into any of the recognized categories of academic life. Even on academic grounds, Mr. Brinton has told us, it is now hard to distinguish between those who teach American history and those who teach American literature: both are interested in Emerson and in the rural press of Buncombe County. Mr. Zirkle would admit, I am sure, what is equally true, that professors and researchers in chemistry persist in reading physics, and professors and researchers in physics persist in reading chemistry. Toward the end of the 19th century there appeared various tidy systems for the organization of knowledge on which we have come to put too heavy a reliance. Intramurally these led to departmental libraries in disciplines as small as mathematics, physics and chemistry. Extramurally, they led to the libraries specializing by subject as subject was understood and defined at the turn of the century. That a new approach is possible within a particular institution has been brilliantly demonstrated at Harvard where the breakdown has now been by [21]

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frequency of use rather than by subject. It may well be that in the f u t u r e research libraries generally will need to follow a similar principle, maintaining in their own buildings collections of material constantly or frequently used and allocating to some central or regional agency the responsibility for gathering and organizing the vast bulk of highly specialized material, parts of which every institution needs sometime b u t no institution needs every day or every year. GEORGE EVELYN HUTCHINSON:* I should first like to

assure Mr. Beals, did he ever catch me in the Public Library in New York and wonder what on earth I was doing, that I had not brought any excess quantity of muddy water in there, b u t was probably digging guano, because he has a very magnificent collection of middle 19th century pamphlets on the subject. I want to develop an analogy which has probably been in many people's minds and which I owe to Rebecca West's wonderful book, The Strange Necessity, an analogy between the entire body of human production, in art and literature and scholarship and science, and the cerebral cortex, because I think that that type of analogy is a rather profitable one. T h e library is essentially an enormous memory and it has to be provided with metabolic aids and conditions for healthy respiration and so on,—we need not go into the exact analogies, the elevator shafts, and so on, but they are all there. O n e may think back to what is supposed to have happened in Cromagnon times, when the * Professor of Zoology, Yale University.

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human brain got just a little too big for itself and people with rather large skulls, implying perhaps 200 or 300 cubic centimeters bigger brains than the average in this room, were wandering about in a chilly landscape in France painting bison on the walls of caves. Their immediate descendants reduced their brain size a little (or that has, anyhow, been claimed) and the explanation that has been given is that it was altogether too difficult to keep a big brain in order metabolically and also to get messages in and out of it through the base of the skull, and that it was, therefore, desirable to reduce the size. It is perfectly clear that that is the condition of this enormous external cortex, this inanimate memory outside of us at the present time. That is the problem we are here to talk about, the problem that human evolution was faced with, according to radiocarbon dating about 12,000 B.C., or possibly a little bit earlier. And I want to speak on this, mainly from the standpoint of one of these people who are really the cause of the offense, the people who insist upon sitting down and scribbling and scribbling, until there is a new book to fill an otherwise nice, innocent space on the stack shelf. It seems to me that we have to justify our existence; otherwise we are making our existence intolerable for you without any really very good reason. And the best way that we can justify our existence is probably to give a maximum value in a minimum volume. There are, theoretically, two ways by which one can do this. One can make books smaller and smaller and smaller with the same amount on a page and get a microfilm, and [23]

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I have no doubt that the ultimate horror in this direction will be to get such a page cut down to a size that is limited only by the thermal vibration of the molecules of the material on which it is "printed." That difficulty will, no doubt, finally be obviated by keeping all literature in some sort of refrigerator at a temperature of about 240° A. and then passing radiation through it onto a screen with the appropriate magnifying devices. It would probably first have to be very short-wave x-rays which could be transduced with electronic devices to something one could see. That would probably permit a million times as much knowledge as we have now to be quite conveniently housed. That, however, does not seem to me to be the thing that we have to look at at the moment. That is merely a sort of act of faith to think about, which implies that, however long scholarship goes on, probably something can be done about it. What I think we have to do, as a practical problem, is to think about the printed page as we know it. I find, personally, microfilm very hard on the eyes. I have to use a lot of it and I hate to see libraries going over, even for Sears Roebuck catalogues, into microfilm. Anyhow, Godey's Lady's Book without the color would be rather unattractive, and cheap color reproduction is still a thing which has to be worked out both technically and with the unions to get it into the life of scholarship. What we have to do is to get more meaning onto the ordinary page without reducing the size of the symbols inconveniently. Now, there are various ways of attacking that; first, you could easily use simplified spelling. The [24]

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people in communications engineering say that about 40% of the letters in an ordinary English sentence are unnecessary, the criteria being that there is about 99.9% chance of reading it right, if about 40% are left out more or less at random. I do not even want to propose that. What I want to propose is that you should ask the people who write the books that you store to write them economically, clearly, and not be redundant in their words, even if the rules of orthography insist that they be redundant in their letters. There is so much disgracefully sloppy writing, disgracefully redundant, repetitive material filling the hundred thousand periodicals or so that Mr. Zirkle mentioned, that I believe a really systematic clean-up campaign should be applied to learned and scientific literature of all sorts—an attempt to induce people to discipline themselves so that they really write clearly and directly and pleasantly without circumlocutions, without saying the same thing twice over, without forgetting, in fact, that they have already made the point and hammering it in four or five times, while sometimes making points that do not exist and sometimes making points that are not worthwhile. That seems to me to be the first thing that we outside the library can do to mitigate the dire effects of our publications, to prevent you from simply being drowned in a rain of books. The other thing may sound a little bit the opposite of this proposal, but I think in the end that it has the same sort of effect. And that is that a great deal more effort should be put into making comprehensive monographs and summaries that really do render most copies of everything that went before [25]

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quite unnecessary, at least in the sciences. So many people when they write a book say that half a dozen people have worked on a particular subject and the results may be found in their papers. T h a t is a quite useful thing to know, but it does not provide one with a real summary of knowledge; it merely tells one how, with considerable labor which the author has also been all through himself, one can make such a summary. That is not a very useful thing if, as sometimes happens, one has to give a lecture on the subject and one has an hour and ten minutes in which to prepare, of which one hour is involved with a faculty meeting. I realize that the remarks that I have made are not really addressed to the library profession. They are an expression of penitence. But I hope that you will carry away with you at least some slight impression that there are some people in the sciences who are worried about the way that a totally unnecessary amount of literature is spilled out into libraries in an irresponsible way and really want to do something about making it a better, cleaner, more easily digested type of intellectual food. This paper was followed by a brief discussion on proper use and teaching of English.

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DECLINE HOW SHALL

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»X«K E Y E S D.

METCALF*

I

T is a pleasure and an honor for me as Librarian of Harvard College to extend to the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, on the occasion of the Celebration of its 200th Anniversary, cordial greetings and good wishes from our country's oldest library. I am sure that without giving offense to the other college and university libraries that date back before the American Revolution—William and Mary, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth and Rutgers—I can congratulate the Library of the University of Pennsylvania and its Director for having taken larger steps forward in the past five years than any of the rest of us in its age group, and I am equally sure that without offense to the University of Pennsylvania I can say that, unless you provide better physical conditions for your Library in the near future, Director, University Library, Harvard University.

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you will seriously handicap the service and prestige of your University. I have been asked to speak upon the ever expanding demand for library materials and the threatened decline of support; how shall the gap be filled? T h e book collections in university libraries have grown rapidly. Fremont Rider demonstrated that in the past they tended to double every sixteen years, and that the growth was by geometrical progression and not arithmetical in character. Current statistics indicate that in our largest university libraries the percentage of growth is decreasing, but the actual increase in volume count is still becoming larger year by year. This growth is a terrifying thing, even if it becomes arithmetical rather than geometrical. In fact, so long as a library grows more rapidly than the rest of the university to which it is attached, the situation will be serious because the library will tend each year to take a larger percentage of the total resources of the university. It will mean taking money from another part of the university and giving it to the library. The part that gains may not always do so to its own advantage, if it becomes unpopular thereby with the university administration and the faculty. But how can the library avoid this result since it increases its size and therefore its expenditures more rapidly than other parts of the university; and when, in the very nature of the case, it seems compelled to do so? But let us be a little more specific. What is involved in this growth of libraries? Why should they increase their budgets at the expense of others? First and foremost is the [28]

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fact that the library—unlike other parts of the university except the museum—accumulates material and does not discard it. This means constant additions to storage space, and space of any kind becomes more and more expensive. Second, increase in the number of additions to the collections involves increased appropriations for cataloguing; moreover, it seems to cost more to add a book to a 2,000,000volume library than to a 1,000,000-volume one. In some of our larger libraries the cost of cataloguing is greater than the cost of the books purchased. The cost of adding new books to a library falls into four fairly equal parts: the purchase price of the book, the cost of cataloguing it, the cost of providing storage space for it, and the cost of servicing it. A factor of scarcely less importance is the increased demands made upon the library. Here we have the interesting fact, one at the same time pleasant and distressing, that the better service a library gives, the greater the demands that are made upon it. This frequently has a disconcerting effect on library budgets following the expansion of physical plant and services. For instance, at Harvard after the Lamont Library was opened, the Widener reading room seemed nearly empty. But today, two years later, both are comfortably filled day after day. Where do the people come from? Closely related to this is the fact that the larger and more inclusive a library, the larger the number of people who find in it the books they need. Increased use follows, by those directly connected with the university and also by visiting scholars. The Widener Building at Harvard, which [29]

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contains only a third of the books belonging to the University, served 1200 visiting scholars last year simply because it had the books that these scholars wanted and could not find elsewhere as conveniently, if at all. Inter-library loan demands also increase with the size and importance of a collection, and represent an expensive type of library service. But there is still another problem related to library expenditures. Every few years, if not oftener, almost every university decides to give instruction in some new field—a new subject, a new language—and accelerated growth in this area results. Money must be spent for these books and for their care, and then more readers appear from somewhere to use them. If they did not, we should be disappointed. This may all be summed up by repeating my earlier statement that library expenses tend to increase more rapidly than those for other parts of a university and therefore to take an ever-increasing percentage of the resources of the institution. This is bad enough under any conditions, but, when inflation comes, the future looks far from bright, particularly if building space happens to be inadequate at the time. The problem before us then is, what do we do about this difficult financial situation? I shall say nothing of microfilm, or of asking authors to write shorter books (cf. Mr. Hutchinson), but I can suggest seven other possible courses of action. You will note that I say courses of action, not different solutions of the problem. T h e first is certainly not a [30]

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solution. I call it the counsel of despair. We simply admit, to our regret, that adequate funds are not available, and that the service must gradually deteriorate. As a result, demands will lessen and we shall get along as best we can. Some universities have already followed this course for a considerable period. Each year their collections become less important in the world of learning. Each year the reputation of the university slips downhill. I am afraid that a good many universities, particularly endowed ones, may follow this course in the years ahead. A second possible course is one already mentioned. It is simply to say that the library is so important that it must be carried on—so each year one or more professorships or some other part of the university's work will be dropped and funds transferred to the library. This might be pleasing to us as librarians and make us feel important, but it would not solve the problem, and sooner or later those of us who recommended it would find ourselves in trouble. Indeed, I think it fair to say that one of the greatest handicaps that librarians face today is the fact that they have the reputation for using more than their share of university appropriations. They are accused of being magpies who collect anything and everything, not because the things will be used, but simply because they are magpies. The library is considered a rathole down which any amount of money may be poured without, alas, drowning the rat! The librarian is in ill repute as a result, and faces his problems with two strikes against him. A third method of dealing with the question is to decide [31]

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that the library will continue to buy books as it has in the past so as to keep up the quality of its collections, but that it will reduce the service given to what might be called the European university library level. This can be done on the basis that the scholar who really counts will find his material in some way if the books are in the library, and that the service is less important than the books. Much may be said for this solution. No one can deny that there are great libraries abroad and that important work is done in them. It may be irritating to have to wait twenty-four hours to obtain a book; it may be annoying not to be admitted to the shelves, and not to be able to see at the same time all the books on your particular subject. The question is, how much is it worth to have the American type of library service, and where will this proposal lead us if we follow it year after year? A fourth attack on the problem might be to discard as much material each year as is added, thereby reducing demands for more shelf space. Unfortunately, this has never been given a fair trial by a large research library because of the difficulty of selecting material for discard and the cost of the necessary changes in records. A fifth course of action is one that I am sure we should pursue as far as we can, and that is to do all within our power to operate our libraries more efficiently so as to make our funds go farther. T h e sixth possibility is for the librarian to turn moneyraiser and find the additional funds required to keep going on the present scale. Many university presidents have had [32]

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to take the much larger task on their shoulders for the university as a whole. This again has something to recommend it, although I am afraid that most librarians will not qualify for the task. In the past, at least, they have not been selected with it in view. The seventh solution, and the one with which I wish to deal in somewhat more detail, is cooperation among libraries with the hope that available funds will go farther in that way. We have progressed rapidly in this respect in recent years, and I think it is fair to say that the average university librarian now thinks of other university libraries not as rivals to his own, as he was inclined to do a generation ago, but as places to which he can turn for material not in his own institution. There seem to be three major varieties of inter-library cooperation: Cooperative indexing and cataloguing Cooperative storage Cooperative acquisitions. Inter-library cooperation began with cooperative indexing and cataloguing. The former had a place for a time, but centralized service on a commercial basis turned out to be a better solution. A somewat similar situation has developed in cooperative cataloguing, but we hope that centralized cataloguing at the Library of Congress, rather than in commercial hands, will continue. I think we should go on to say that the larger the library, the less useful cooperative or centralized cataloguing seems to be. Cooperative storage which dates back to President Eliot's proposal of nearly fifty years ago was first brought to frui[33]

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tion in 1942 in the New England Deposit Library. It has provided cheap storage for little-used books satisfactorily, but would be more useful if the cooperating institutions were more similar in character and therefore had similar collections from which many duplicates could be eliminated when ready for the storage warehouse. The Midwest Inter-Library Corporation, which will open its doors this fall, should be able to work this out. It is considering cooperative acquisition of less-used material as well as cataloguing. Preliminary conversations have been going on for several years regarding proposals for such a similar institution in the northeast, one that might take other steps ahead in library cooperation. But cooperative acquisition need not stop with a deposit library, and this brings us to the crux of our problem. I think it fair to say that the Lamont Library has demonstrated that a collection of 100,000 volumes, with a comparatively small staff, can provide for 90 per cent of the needs of the undergraduate in a first-class college at a very reasonable cost—say $15 per student per year, if the building charges are excluded. I think it is also fair to say that a good reference and working library for a university can be provided with a collection of 500,000 volumes. This will be more expensive, student by student, faculty member by faculty member, than an undergraduate college library like Lamont, but again the cost would be reasonable. If these two types of libraries were sufficient, we should not be discussing the problem with which I am dealing. The great cost of a university library, the cost that tends to [34]

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swamp us, is for the larger collections—beyond the halfmillion mark—of material used for advanced research by graduate students preparing their dissertations, and by faculty members, material that on the whole is very little used. A large percentage of it has never been used, and may never be used, but was acquired because of its potential usefulness; and most of it in a library as large as Harvard's is used on the average perhaps only once in twenty years or more, but of course somewhat more frequently in a smaller collection. It is this material that brings prestige to a university library, that causes the library and its staff, and the university as a whole, to be proud of it and to want continually to add to it; but it is this material that costs the money, which we have difficulty finding, to buy, to catalogue, to store and to serve, and it is this material to which cooperative acquisition should apply. The Farmington Plan represents one attack on the problem. It attempts to bring into the country one copy of all new monographs published abroad, with the hope that additional copies will be purchased only when prospective demands are sufficient to make it desirable. The cooperative acquisition proposal of the Midwest Inter-Library Corporation is another possible method that might be used. I hope that our great libraries—instead of lying down on the job as I have said some of them may do—will get together in these and other ways and see to it that this expensive research material can be found somewhere in each region, but that needless duplication be avoided. Those who need to use the material may then go to the place [35]

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where it is housed or borrow it by inter-library loan. In either case consideration must be given to the possible desirability of fees for its use by those who did not have a share in the acquisition, cataloguing, and storage expenses. Such fees may at first seem to be defeating the whole purpose of cooperation, but I am inclined to think that a more careful study may indicate that they may be the best way to promote it. Nothing that I have said should be taken as meaning that I believe that all libraries now have assigned to them their proper share of their university resources. I am sure that some have not, but I am just as sure that before we obtain more money, we must demonstrate clearly that we are using our present resources to the best advantage and that the pressure for increased support is not based primarily on our natural desire to enlarge our own departments, and that our faculty members are convinced that a shift of more funds to the library is reasonable and should have their support.

DISCUSSION * It is a pleasure for me to bring you greetings on your Bicentennial Celebration from your national library, which has just completed a Sesquicentennial Celebration and which, while not like Harvard your oldest and not like Pennsylvania 200 years old, is nevertheless your greatest library. One of the reasons that the LUTHER H . EVANS:

* Librarian of Congress.

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Library of Congress is the national library and is growing greater, is engaging in ever wider services, is because 25 years ago Senator Pepper put through a law which established a Trust Fund Board for the administration of gifts of money, of bonds and valuables of many kinds which can be converted into money, for the growth of the Library. I would like to take this opportunity to say that, if in the development of this Library George Wharton Pepper is now a towering figure, 25 years ago he was a pillar of strength to your national library's history. There is very little that I can add to what Keyes Metcalf has said. I agree with him that the solution is not solely in the direction of getting more money, that there must be a serious reconsideration of the role of individual libraries, that there must be a release of material either into discard or into the semi-discard which he has described as the "storage plan." I agree that there must be more cooperative effort in order that the burden can be distributed in accordance with some logical pattern such as the Farmington Plan. I believe that libraries must take, and the university presidents and the boards of one kind and another who regulate other large libraries must take, a clear view of just what the functions are. In doing that, I think they should curtail accumulation for prestige motives, and they should rely more upon the development of bibliographical services and lending services to meet the occasional need, having their collections built around the concept of fairly constant need. There is an eighth idea which I should like to add to [37]

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Mr. Metcalf's seven, as only a partial answer and an answer only for a few of the greater libraries, and that is the answer that is contained in a measure of federal support. Texans as you know are states-righters and in the matter of libraries I am very much of a states-righter. But I think there are two bases on which one could logically and rightly build a program of federal support. T h e minor of these is that in some of our great centers, where there are many branch offices of federal agencies and where there are many research activities going on under the aegis of such agencies, a drain is being placed upon the library resources of the area without any contribution being made to offset that burden. At the Library of Congress we once got a querulous letter from Ralph Beals, then in Chicago, saying that the federal agencies located in that city were a serious problem and a serious burden to the University of Chicago Library, and another of similar content from the head of the Denver Public Library. T h e second base is an ever broader and better base, it seems to me, for federal support, namely, the theory that the pool of scholarship in any real sense of the term in this country is a pool that is supported for the most part by the universities. T h e universities are the training ground for the intellects who broaden our knowledge in all fields, they are the recruiting grounds for our specialists in government, both in time of war and in time of peace. T h e United States Government in relation to this pool of scholarship is largely parasitical. It is hauling the fish out of the pool

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whenever it wishes, but it is contributing nothing to the food supply for the sustenance of the fish, except free government documents. I would subscribe, therefore, to a doctrine that the national interest is so affected by the resources of the major research libraries of the country that federal support for their adequacy in the growth and feeding of scholars is reasonable. And by scholars in this sense I would include all kinds of technical experts who might potentially be drawn upon by the government. The method of implementing this theory would be difficult, but my own idea is that we should immediately spurn any conception of building federal branch libraries in various parts of the country. We should spurn any idea of having inter-library library centers supported by the federal government; rather we should frankly subsidize particular centers of learning according to some kind of scale which could be worked out, I believe, for the purpose of supporting their activities in particular designated areas of knowledge. Thus the University of Pennsylvania Library might be supported in its efforts to provide research resources and services in a particular area of knowledge, but not for activities in some other branch of knowledge. I would like to conclude by saying that it seems to me that the public in the United States has accepted firmly the doctrine that libraries are entitled to public support, and I believe that libraries ought to request public support, and leave the private fortunes to support art, music, ballet, the theater and other forms of cultural and civilizing activi[39]

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ties which the public is not willing to support. Of course, I hope people who use their money to purchase books will continue to give them to libraries. ALFRED H . W I L L I A M S : * T h e operating costs of research libraries are increasing more rapidly than income. Mr. Metcalf's suggestions as to how to close the gap are stimulating. He advises against curtailment of expenditures for needed physical space, service personnel and library materials. He warns against encroachment on the budgets of other university departments. He stresses the need for greater operating efficiency and more inter-library cooperation so as to lower unit costs of such functions as purchasing, indexing, cataloguing and storage. But the problem of operating deficits is likely to be a continuing one despite the best efforts of library administrators to pare their budgets. T h e role of the research library in a dynamic civilization such as we have in the United States is bound to be an expanding one. Mr. Metcalf recognizes this when he holds that increased revenue, not lower costs, is the solution for your financial ills. I shall confine my remarks to this point. There are two ultimate sources of library revenue: tax funds and private income. Adopting the Moderator's suggestion that we be contentious, I question the thought that we should look to tax revenues as the long-run source of funds for research libraries. I would expect the legislative budget-makers—federal, state, and local—to give only * President, Federal Reserve Bank, Philadelphia.

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the tag ends of their appropriations to libraries, unless librarians and their boards of managers become much more persuasive than hitherto. What about other sources of support? Individual library patrons, those sensitive but rare souls, whose benefactions have done so much in the past to promote excellence in the field of learning, are being decimated by the tax collector and cannot be relied upon to meet the expanding needs. But, if university libraries are to maintain their vital role in the life of these troublous times, where are the needed funds to be found? The most promising source, I venture to suggest, is the business corporation. Much indirect support now comes from American industry—grants for teaching, research, buildings and equipment, and scholarships. Notable instances exist in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, botany, and medicine. Funds come readily because the benefits to individual enterprises and to entire industries are frequently apparent and measurable, because they are direct. But in these days of heavy excess profits taxes what about an appeal to business corporations for direct financial support for general university research libraries qua research libraries? The case must be made broadly, boldy, imaginatively. We have built in this country, for good or ill, what is essentially a business civilization. For several decades it has been undergoing severe trials. Internally the zeal for social justice on the part of industrial workers has wrought great changes in the distribution of wealth and income; externally our mode of life is being challenged both directly [41]

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and by implication. Under these circumstances, business executives, together with other leaders, are questioning our values and social institutions as never before. They are seeking to improve human relations within their own companies; they are looking for new sources of knowledge of individual and group motivation and behavior; they are assaying their own leadership. They are saying, in effect: What can we do to preserve our way of life? It seems legitimate to hold out to these men the expectation that guidance will come from findings in fields as diverse as social anthropology, history, government, psychology, economics, sociology and literature. The dedicated workers in all of these fields are serviced by the research library. Without its facilities they will be severely handicapped in their efforts to understand life and to help their fellow men achieve sound moral and spiritual values. Scholars everywhere are needed, if mankind is to obtain understanding and tolerance for our diverse cultures. And scholars in turn need richly stocked libraries. It is my judgment that necessary funds will be forthcoming from corporate leaders if you present your cause fully and with confidence born of a sense of its righteousness.

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CONTEMPORARY A PROBLEM

SOCIETY

OF THE PROPER

OF SERVICES

IN

RECOGNITION

RENDERED

If the Research Library Could Speak

CARL

M.

WHITE*

r TOUGH-MINDED president o£ a commercial orW ' B ganization who contributes a substantial sum each year to the support of an independent research library was asked: "Why do you do it?" " T h e cheapest way out," he came back. T h e corporation's librarian had explained to him that if a strong research library were not within easy reach, a minimum of $600,000 would be required to reinforce the working library which under present circumstances is sufficient. Let this corporation invent a marketable product, and the world is promptly told all about it. No one, however, hears a word about the research library's part in the achievement, so people go right on picturing industrial advances as the handiwork of those two press and cartoon favorites: that self-made inventor who tinkers in his * Director of Libraries, Columbia University.

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basement, and that white-jacketed man who postures with his half-empty test-tube, both lonely men who depend on nothing but sheer genius. If the research library could speak, it would tell us that most basic discoveries are seldom, if ever, solo performances of this kind. Nowadays scientific and technological discoveries are nearly always the fruit of cooperative effort of which library research is an underrated phase. (Mr. Zirkle concurs, I note with great pleasure.) The research library could tell us a good deal more about its little-known connections with this proud industrial civilization of ours. What it would tell us no man fully knows, but it can be hinted at by contrasting the man holding that overpublicized test-tube with Pericles, let us say. What is the big difference between these two men? It is not in brain capacity, not their deeper aspirations, their codes of personal behavior or their political philosophy (assuming that the man with the test-tube is a safe security risk). Does not the big difference lie in a sort of house which twentieth century man has built for himself through industrial progress? The technique of building that house is a pretty complex affair, but one of its central elements is research library service—that ingenious means we have devised by which each one of us, however wise or stupid, is permitted full access to recorded experience back to the time when man first began to write down the things he deemed important. Destroy all libraries. Create no substitutes to take their place. Make each man begin as prelibrary man began. Make him learn all he ever learns strictly from first-hand experience and from what he can [44]

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pick up orally from others. Do this and what would happen? T h e big, beautiful house we live in would in time come tumbling down, leaving the man with the test-tube beside Pericles, bereft of all these mighty creations which come from pooling the creative work of minds scattered over the globe and back across the centuries. If our wonder-man with that test-tube is connected with a university instead of industry, we follow a different path, but it, too, leads around to the library in the end. Listen to one of his former students tell a house-guest what makes a university tick and you will not think so. "Yes," he winds up, "yes, it is great men that make it a great place. When you get down to brass tacks, a university is nothing but men and equipment, like test-tubes. And equipment, you know, really matters very little. Reminds me of a story about a man who had a pupil and nothing else, but a log. His name was Mark Hopkins . . . " Distinguished achievement, to be sure, occurs nowhere without great men; but, to rhapsodize on this theme, the idea that a university is a one-legged, or at most a twolegged, stool is to miss what makes university work different from other work. Great men are important, but great men are not enough. Nothing about the modern university is more peculiar than that its men, to be fit for appointment, must master and keep on mastering something we call figuratively "fields of learning," and the live, growing subject matter which is the heritage of the twentieth century university has become far too agile and too voluminous to be carried around under any man's hat with or without [45]

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the aid of a log or a test-tube. If a research library could speak, it would point out this fact and indicate that it stands for subject matter—equipment more like a second nervous system than logs or test-tubes. (Mr. Hutchinson and I join in making this point by coincidence, not by premeditated design.) T h e research library would tell us further that the utterances of the greatest university men are pretty feeble and fragmentary and that the most eminent of them regularly and humbly come to the research library as to a fountain to renew their strength. It could tell us, if our hearing were acute enough to catch it, about its deeper connections with all things of the mind, which relation can be illustrated by exhibiting the research library as one of the cornerstones of human freedom in a civilization as advanced as ours. A study of the centuries brings out how problems which force themselves into prominence constantly shift. T h e authors of the Bill of Rights, for example, were remarkably successful in countering the threats to human freedom they knew about with a statement of principles of timeless significance. Their century, however, did not make them witness the tissues of a greater Reich feeding on propaganda or teach them how methodically men's minds can be twisted behind an iron curtain. Here something more diabolical is involved than simple denial of freedom to express ourselves and to use the press and other machinery of communication to assist us in so doing. We are learning, sorrowfully, how men's minds can be so enslaved, without being sure it is happening, that when men speak or publish, as if it were freely and [46]

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honestly, they utter misshapen truths or lies hidden even from themselves. T h e experience brings home the need of a freedom which did not come up for discussion in the 18th century when the Bill of Rights was being written, the need, namely, of freedom of access to the complete, forthright record of the mind. Provision of such access is precisely the function of the research library. It is the most reliable means yet devised, whereby men can check up on the accuracy, reasonableness, of one another's utterances, and it deserves recognition on this account as a cornerstone of our freedom. This highly perfected institution, the research library, thus closely linked with achievements which are hallmarks of the twentieth century and with values which free men treasure more even than their lives, is in our time imperilled, both from within and without. It is caught in a four-pronged squeeze for funds caused by healthy demands from an expanding reader-population, by the mountainous proportions of the expanding record it is assembling, by tax policies and by inflation. Happily, some libraries do not feel that squeeze; some at the other extreme are being killed by it. T h e state of health generally would be described as fair to poor and worsening. Independent libraries are the hardest hit but are not alone in their troubles. Careful economies are being practiced while plans are being pushed for broad reorganization aimed at building cooperative effort into the very structure of the research library setup. T h e latter step, if it succeeds, will bring a certain amount of relief to most research libraries, but [47]

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progress to date hardly warrants expectations that the total bill society is going to be called on to pay for research library service can be kept within the present figure. Here then are two hard facts which must be faced: financial support of the research library is lagging behind what is urgently needed right now, while total library costs have not stopped climbing. Contrast this picture of peril with that of a land of plenty. As a nation, we are not bankrupt by a long shot. We spend $15,000,000 a year for lipstick, $125,000,000 a year for greeting cards, $150,000,000 for chewing gum, $3,500,000,000 for cigarettes—and the figures are going up. So, hearteningly, is the figure for charity. T h e national total for gifts to charity has risen to three times the figure for 1929. By the way, to accent a point made by Mr. Williams, corporate profits after taxes have risen to four times the figure for 1937. T h e Republic is in sound financial condition. (Touché, Mr. Peiser; see his better putting of it on page 56.) It is perfectly capable of footing a larger bill for the research library, provided enough people are positively convinced that it is worth what it costs. Why are they not convinced? First, because the Republic has no research library policy, and it has none because it has been spared the trouble of working out one. From its earliest origins, the research library has enjoyed the patronage of the ruling class in one country after another—ruling sovereigns, church leaders, families of the aristocracy, merchant princes, and now the Politburo. In this country, we have no ruling class. T h e support of the research library [48]

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has nevertheless fallen to a minority. It is an American-bred nobility which has on its own public spirited initiative put the cause of libraries a notch above selfish uses of its energies and its material wealth. T h e idea that the research library movement has been, and is, the responsibility chiefly of a minority can be challenged by pointing to the fact that taxes from millions of taxpayers find their way each year into tax supported research libraries. But I am persuaded that this particular tax bill should, as of this date, be looked upon as a sort of rider attached to bills for higher education, to bills for agriculture, for good government and other matters on which the American people can more truly be said to have a conscious policy. T h e people generally have strung along with the research library because of leaders whom they respect, but their vague views of what they are doing contrast sharply with the virile, infectious convictions of the minority which have put the punch into the American research library movement thus far. As a national asset in its own right, the research library has yet to register on the public mind. Second, the research library is up against it for lack of vocal apparatus. By "vocal apparatus," I mean leaders of stature who understand what the research library is doing and who are supported by the followers, the public forums, press channels and other facilities necessary to carry their voices clearly to all those whose convictions about the research library are vital to its future. T h e research library can win, hands down, the patronage of the select circle [49]

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which works with it closely enough to know its worth, but it is ill equipped to make use of the everyday processes by which a modern democracy makes up its mind on what it considers important. There is no cynicism in this remark, although it clearly points to a danger. A democracy's intentions issue from the heart and are of purest gold, but in practice what a democracy supports issues from what individuals like you and me know, or think they know; and, in consequence, that cause or institution is favored or tends to be favored which carries first-class vocal equipment right into daily action with it. If, for example, some high-placed official in Washington, Paris or Tokyo refuses to release information which a reporter on the spot deems important, the refusal itself will in a few hours probably be shouted from street corners in Seattle, Ottawa and Singapore. This comes about because the reporter is more than a mere news-gatherer. He is part of the highly-perfected vocal apparatus which the press carries with it everywhere it goes, ready to be thrown into action the instant its welfare is jeopardized. Not every public interest is so well served, and the research library falls in this class. This paragraph is written on the day the American people are learning of the death of Arthur Vandenberg, whom we honor for helping shape an unpartisan internationalist policy. But Vandenberg, a converted isolationist, had not always supported the cause he served so well after 1945. T h e change was in him, not in the worthiness of the cause he came to espouse. His con[50]

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version simply brought that cause powerful vocal support otherwise denied it. The new factor in the research library situation thus boils down to this: if a financially strong nation is going to provide better financing, more time and thought will in the future have to go into producing a climate which will yield the needed support. This is particularly true of the independent library, although, if the analysis above is sound, the tax supported library may face a similar situation. T h e tax supported library, no less than the independent library, is sustained by men and women who may be maneuvered awhile into giving nominal support, but they are free agents, and will they not in the end put their money where their hearts are, let it be money which they distribute themselves or money which the state first takes from them and distributes in their name? The best thing the research library can do in its own behalf is to make sure it continues to do a job which is worth supporting. The rest is up to the public. Under our system it is neither right nor possible for libraries to try to settle certain questions alone. The public must decide for itself such questions as what standard of library service it wants to pay for, and how it is going to pay for it. Is it, for example, going to plump for greater reliance on centralized distribution of wealth by the state or ease the way for voluntary support of such institutions as the research library? Whether these and other community responsibilities are [51]

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to be picked up by the public or defaulted will depend a great deal on the calibre and number of lay leaders who enlist as spokesmen for the research library. There are two planes on which they can be of service. One is local. The "friends of the library movement" offers a ready outlet for lay support of the local library. This movement has produced a fair share of organizations that have stood for nothing more stirring to the imagination than buying duplicate copies of reserve books or supplying volunteers to keep treasure rooms open. But other organizations have aimed higher. They have grasped clearly the significance of organized lay support in a land where moral support is the foundation of dollar support. They have mobilized enterprise of a kind that has made the local community such a powerful force in American life. They have successfully pictured the job of building a research library as challenging enough to appeal to men who are in the habit of getting things done. And, it is worth noting, each successful organization has gone out of its way to make the hunting good sport for the whole party of its friends. The future of the institution, the research library, is of course a national problem in a sense in which the future of the local library is not. If this larger problem is to be dealt with adequately, the research library must stop being the forgotten leg of the stool. T h e top command in opinion forming circles nationally, from the popular hero with his test-tube to the Vandenbergs, must stop shrugging off the research library with, "let the librarians worry about that," and must speak up for the kind of library service they want [52]

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to pay for and how, if they know. The greatest danger the research library faces at mid-century is the danger of being all but ignored in this echelon, although the prospect is not hopeless. While to date most tycoons of national opinion are as mute on research library policy as the stone pillars of our libraries, we are witnessing a heartening growth of forums by leading newspapers on complex problems, certain experiments—in effect or projected—in radio broadcasting and television and some promising work by news magazines, all of which rises from responsible efforts in high places to help a self-governing people consider what is important, not just what titillates their fancy. Of the problems that take front rank in our time, the development of leaders and leadership methods which match our leadership requirements belongs in the top half dozen of anybody's list. How much the larger American community is going to be led to consider the research library in the future is a piece of this larger problem. In the meantime, if the Library whose 200th birthday we gather to celebrate today could speak, it would tell us—in persuasive terms, I venture to say—that its opportunity for usefulness is limited only by the support it receives at the hands of the Philadelphia community and the American community. If similar libraries could speak up, they would, I am sure, congratulate the University of Pennsylvania on creating an occasion which calls attention to the public's responsibility in this long-standing and very fruitful partnership between the public and the Pennsylvania Library and between the public and all other libraries of its kind. Many happy [53]

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birthdays, Mr. Moderator, and extraordinary congratulations to Winston Churchill and your trustees. The Churchill address is the first speech bearing on the research library which has ever had to be cancelled anywhere to avoid undue public excitement. Things are looking up. DISCUSSION KURT PEISER: * Mr. White's able paper on the research library does not permit much controversy. His statement is clear regarding the purposes and problems of the research library in contemporary society, and with much of Mr. White's comments one can readily agree. The importance of the research library in contemporary society falls under three main headings. First, there is national interest. I am sure that we will all agree that a high standard of education and research which can be maintained by a research library is essential to the political, economic and cultural well-being of our nation. Second, there is economic interest in which there is a real dependence of industry and commerce upon research facilities. Third, there is the educational impact in which the research library can provide proper access to, and use of, sources of information which are, indeed, prerogatives of an educated youth and an educated public. Education, in turn, is the best long-term insurance for keeping safe democratic ideas and ideals and preventing encroachment against our freedom by authoritarian ideologies. * Vice-President in Charge of Development, University of Pennsylvania.

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Unfortunately, economically abnormal conditions, i.e., depression and inflation, create the heaviest demand upon libraries. During a depression, unproductive leisure is increased and with it reading; during an inflationary period, industrial and commercial expansion increases the demand on research facilities of libraries. The particular parties involved in these two phases of the economic cycle are industry and government. Neither is continuously concerned with the support of libraries or able to contribute equally to their upkeep. However, it is my feeling that the problems faced by the research library should become the concern of these two groups. Germany, after World War I, recognizing this particular phenomenon, created the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, which is supported by industry and government in varying degrees and administered by a board composed of representatives of these two groups and the academic world, with the actual allotment of funds directed by specialists, the best qualified persons in various fields of research. Perhaps a similar organization in the United States may be the best answer to the present economic crisis of higher education. I do not take issue with Mr. White's hypothetical former student who states, "It is great men that make (a university) a great place." I am sure that most persons share this view. Perhaps, if librarians in universities were permitted to participate in the shaping of educational policy and if they were to have classroom or seminar contact with students, the hypothetical former student might include the librarian and the library in his reminiscences and assign to the

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library its proper value in the large picture of a great university. Although some may question Mr. White's statement that the Republic is in a sound financial condition, one can certainly have very little doubt that the United States is a country of unrivalled wealth. In this connection, reference may be made to the following statement in the Princeton University symposium on "physical science and human values": [The United States] "could spend something like fifty per cent more for the Bikini atomic bomb test than it cost to build Boulder Dam! Anyway, for our little show at Bikini—it's all over now and all we are going to get out of it is gotten—we spent more than the maintenance of Princeton University costs on a steady endowment basis."1 Mr. White's statement that "the best thing the research library can do in its own behalf is to make sure it continues to do a job which is worth supporting" creates a conflict. If a library is called upon to choose between doing a job worth doing in terms of benefit to research or a job which is considered "worth supporting" by its benefactors, which will it choose? Few librarians will have the strength of character to choose the former if support is insufficient for both. If the choice is between a new tax structure which permits accumulation of large fortunes, part of which may ultimately find their way to the support of libraries, and a higher tax rate to provide support for educational institui Princeton Bicentennial Conference on the Future of Nuclear Science, Physical Science and Human Values, Princeton, 1947, p. 33.

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tions, the latter must be preferred, as long as it is kept free from political influence, as being more stable and more dependable. We say "must" since the former method undoubtedly is more pleasing to a great many of us. I think, instead of saying, "If the research library could speak," we must think in terms of the research library becoming a vocal part of our American life, since it contributes so greatly to the continuance of all phases of our material well-being and to the continuance of the concepts of our American way of life. I am in complete agreement with Mr. White regarding the necessity of bringing "vocal apparatus" to the research library program, regarding the necessity of leaders of stature using the medium of radio, television, public forums, and the press in order to bring to the public the knowledge and recognition of the importance of the services rendered by the research library to all of us. Such a program of promotion is used in various fields—whether it be philanthropy, business or education. Why not then for the library? It is high time that the picture of a living book, with its pages reaching out into the lives of the student body, the faculty and all of those who avail themselves of the knowledge contained therein, shaping the philosophy and the policy of the lives of each of those who read, be portrayed in the most vivid way. We must recognize that the idea of books and libraries need not lack mass appeal, if they are presented to the public in the proper manner. It is because of this fallacious thinking that libraries for years have suffered from lack of funds and support. Funds and sup[57]

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port can be made available if, intrinsic in the very concept of the library and its usage, there is the innate feeling that there is a great craving on the part of all to gain the knowledge that is actually contained in books. We ought to act as a catalytic agent, bringing together the human being and the book and then disappearing as the reaction occurs, again to appear to bring the next human being and the next book together. We must also think in terms of an intelligent leadership —interested but with no vested interests, respected and well-informed—to carry out this program of bringing to the public the story of the research library in contemporary society, its services, its values, and its farreaching shaping of human beings. We, of the University of Pennsylvania, believe in this type of promotion, and, in the Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Establishment of the University Library, give living testimony to that belief. Louis B. WRIGHT: * When I saw my position on the program I decided not to prepare a formal paper, because I thought it would be more merciful to speak extemporaneously—and briefly. But I want to emphasize my agreement with Dr. White's paper, especially the necessity for a realization on the part of the American public of adequate support for research libraries. Such support is more important, I think, than we ourselves may realize, because we forget that the center of gravity for research has shifted • Director, Folger Library, Washington.

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from Europe to the United States, and the center of gravity of libraries has also shifted from the Old World to the New. Seventy-five years ago, at the first meeting of the American Library Association, the first president lamented the fact that nowhere in the New World was there any library where there were adequate resources, to quote him, "for the thorough study of any one topic of recondite learning." That meant research in any field, technological, literary, historical. Nowhere in the Western World was there any place where research could be carried on adequately. Even in my father's generation, advanced students felt the necessity of going to Germany to do research, to take their Ph.D.'s. It is only in our time, at least in the past 50 years, that the libraries of the United States have become adequate for the detailed research required for the advancement of knowledge. We are celebrating here the two hundredth anniversary of one of the distinguished libraries of this country. Its great development, however, occurred not a century and a half ago but since 1900, and that's true all over the Western Hemisphere. The development of the research facilities of the libraries in this country has been so phenomenal during the past 50 years that now it is sometimes necessary for European scholars to come to America to find the materials for the histories of their own countries. That has often been lamented. In 1931, for example, an English scholar wrote with some reproach about a collection in the Huntington Library which ought to have remained in England. Those were the Battle Abbey papers, the papers [59]

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collected over the centuries in the abbey which William the Conqueror established to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Hastings. But, with the change in the means of destruction, with the increase in the hazards of war, another Englishman wrote about two years ago to express his great delight in the existence on the far verge of this continent of a repository for the study of English civilization. It is true that in Washington there is another repository, in the Folger Library, for the history of western civilization in the 16th and 17th centuries, indeed the greatest collection outside the British Museum of these particular source materials. We in this country, both in the privately endowed research libraries and in the great university libraries, hold material which does not exist any longer elsewhere, material which we have made more accessible and more easily available to scholars than would have been otherwise possible. We have an obligation, a continuing obligation, to develop that material and to make it more accessible, and to return something to the Old World. Some of the research libraries are giving scholarships and fellowships, and are emphasizing the need of European scholars to come to this country to use the materials now in our possession. We are using microfilm and returning to the Old World documents which have been brought here, we hope for safe keeping, and as a part of an international heritage; we have assumed a great obligation in collecting all this research material from the ends of the earth. Mr. Evans' library in Washington has one of the greatest [60]

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collections on the history and culture of China in existence, the greatest collection still available to the Western World. This Chinese collection is merely one illustration of the concentration of research materials in libraries in the Western Hemisphere, chiefly in the United States. Our resources mean that we have a responsibility to make such material useful. This service requires money, and it requires a sense of obligation on the part of us who are custodians. I speak with a good deal of feeling, because I represent a privately endowed institution, and from time to time these privately endowed institutions have been accused of standoffishness, of failing to recognize their social obligations. Such criticism is long out-dated. The privately endowed research library is no longer conscious of being a private ducal library, a great man's plaything. It is fortunate that these libraries are now a part of the public domain of knowledge and that they have substantial endowments which enable them to operate for the benefit of mankind and the advancement of knowledge everywhere. The research library in the United States occupies a unique position in the 20th century. It is a repository of knowledge that is rapidly being lost elsewhere. The debacle in Germany resulted in the destruction of some of Germany's greatest libraries and of all those bibliographical facilities for which the Germans were especially famous in pre-Hitler days. Their collapse places a new responsibility upon us. Even England no longer has the financial capacity to carry on bibliographical services to the same extent as formerly. T h e libraries of the United States, especially the [61]

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research libraries, have assumed voluntarily the duty of making available an immense body of knowledge and of making accessible an immense quantity of material of which we are the custodians. We have a great responsibility, and I hope that, not only in academic circles, but wherever men are conscious of the continuity of western culture, this obligation and this responsibility will be recognized.

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Proceedings of the Symposium Second Session Held May 9th, 1951

THE INTELLECTUAL C A R R O L L C . M O R E LAND,

PROCESS Moderator

Librarian, Biddle Law Library

THE BALANCE OF INTERESTS

CONFLICTING

IN BUILDING

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CLAPP*

H E syndics of "one of the few great research libraries of the world" (that is its own description and, parenthetically I might remark, it is not the Library of Congress) met a few years ago to consider its policy of acquisition. T h e result was an answer at two levels, ideal and practical. " T h e ideal objective of such a library," the syndics concluded, "is a complete record of human thought, emotion and action. Its collections should be developed without distinction as to language, date, place and form of publication. In short, it should have everything." 1 Practice, of course, could not hope to achieve this ideal, and the final recommendations of the group were aimed at a target much lower than "everything." So, in all probability, must always be the conclusion when the capacities of a single institution are concerned, no matter how great its resources or catholic its interests. * Chief Assistant Librarían, Library of Congress. l Rollin A. Sawyer, "Book Selection in the Reference Department of the New York Public Library," College and Research Libraries, vi (1944), pp. 20-22.

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What happens, then, to the ideal? Should we have everything? Few even of those who have engaged in amassing research collections can maintain their realization of how very extensive "everything" is. Our interests and energies as librarians are necessarily absorbed in certain more "important" portions of "everything" which, though numerically vastly inferior to other components, are nevertheless sufficiently large to absorb all our capacities. We know with some degree of accuracy how many trade books are published annually in the United States, how many university theses, how many federal documents (at least those reproduced in letterpress), how many newspapers and learned journals. Our knowledge of comparable production for much of the rest of the world is very vague. And when we get away from the more "important" categories we have very little idea of quantities, even for our own country. A recent estimate2 has calculated that, whereas the production of trade books in the United States during 1949 was somewhat under 11,000 titles, the total of publications in just a few additional categories was nearly 200,000, and "everything," consequently, just for the United States and for that one year, was probably in the order of millions of separate titles. Should we have all these? Responsible people, including the syndics whom I have quoted, have testified in the affirmative—regardless of figures. And yet the case is never 2 Jesse H. Shera and Margaret E. Egan, eds., Bibliographic Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 7.

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Organization,

C O M P R E H E N S I V E N E S S VERSUS S E L E C T I V I T Y

quite proven, just as it is never quite disproved; the area of the little used is one where it is most difficult to attach values either to the materials themselves or to the researches which do, or which possibly may, make use of them. Howmuch poorer should we be without the poultry collection of one great library in America, without the Friesian collections of others, or—to make a still stronger case—the circus poster collection of still another library which I might mention or the pharmaceutical advertisements collections of yet another? How much richer should we be if one of us had a comprehensive collection of Christmas greeting cards, or of billboard posters or of Chinese local newspapers? Lacking precise answers to these questions, we are yet aware that collections of some materials serve researches more frequently and apparently more profitably than others. So we adopt a "realistic" attitude; we aim for the more "important" parts of "everything," for the portions which we, as librarians, judge to affect most nearly the research interests of our clientele, of our present and prospective readers, or conversely we collect those things which we are under particular pressure from those readers to collect. And so we found, at the beginning of World War II, that we were all being "realistic;" that we were all, within our capacities, acquiring the same "important" materials, that no one was getting the less "important," and that we were not only the poorer, but dangerously the poorer, as a result. With the Farmington Plan we are trying to rectify [67]

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that mistake; but even the Fannington Plan recognizes that "everything" is much too much to digest, and it aims, in consequence, pretty high in the scale of "importance." Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the Farmington Plan itself is that it is a continual reminder how far we are from collecting "everything." Under the circumstances, it may seem wholly unrealistic to discuss this ideal. But I think we must do so from time to time if only to make clear to ourselves how far from the ideal we are, and also to ascertain what it is that we really are doing. This is one of these occasions. One of the unwritten laws of the universe concerns the right of the scholar to the materials of his scholarship. T h e world may not owe the scholar a living and often does not give him one, but it does owe him the records on which his researches are based. I could expand on this, but time does not permit me; I merely conclude the suggestion by saying that, where access to materials is required, even private interests generally crumble before the scholar's acknowledged public character. How does the scholar exert his right? Chiefly, through his library; and his librarian is in a sense the attorney through whom he presses his claim. T h e librarian admits that his job is to get the right book into the hands of the right person at the right time; and frequently enough he can actually do this; but because his own resources are slender, he leagues with other librarians and attempts through a pooling of resources to equate his ability with his responsibility.

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Does this responsibility extend to "everything"? Potentially it does; let only our clients present an organized demand for Christmas greeting cards, for billboard posters or for Chinese local newspapers, and we shall find somehow a means for providing them. It will immediately be asked, if the individual library cannot hope to acquire "everything" by itself, but can so greatly extend its reach by cooperation with others, what are the criteria which govern the size and character of the individual collection? The syndics whom we have already cited had an answer here. "Our collections," they said, "should be as comprehensive as our resources permit." 1 I venture to say that a similar answer would have been given by every research librarian from the beginning of time. For practical purposes the sole control upon our collecting is the restraining power of the budget bureau. It is probably not fair to take this as a final answer. So intimate with every librarian is his consciousness of limited resources, that he probably gives them undue final importance. In any case, few if any librarians have been able to operate without that consideration, without that consciousness, and it would have been interesting to see what the syndics, for example, would have recommended had they not been able to blame upon limited resources the necessity under which they found themselves for being selective. Implicit in the syndics' answer, however, is the assumption that, in spite of the lengthened reach which interlibrary cooperation gives to the individual library, there is no substitute for immediacy—for having the wanted book [69]

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on the shelf. We have recently been reminded by the custodian of our greatest university library that "borrowing by interlibrary loan is a poor substitute for a good book collection."8 Immediacy is so important to us that we are willing for its sake to make genuine sacrifices—sacrifices such as overcrowded shelves, such as foregoing a little larger slice of "everything," or foregoing better bibliographical control of that portion of "everything" which we now possess, of even foregoing standard bibliographical treatment of the material which we have already in our own collections. These are very genuine alternatives. Can there be any doubt, for example, that we could—and by we I mean librarians as a group—that we librarians could have provided ourselves with a comprehensive collection of Chinese local newspapers during the past fifty years, if we had wanted to, and within the available resources? Immediacy, then, is admittedly important, but I suspect that we have tended to accept its importance too uncritically. Since its real importance is obviously at the heart of any inquiry leading to a rational definition of the size of individual collections (as opposed to the arbitrary, or budget bureau definition, such as President Colwell proposed a couple of years ago4) and of any inquiry leading to the extension of our control over "everything," I suggest that we need to investigate the value of immediacy from several points of view. 8 Keyes D. Metcalf, "Problems of Acquisition Policy in a University Library," Harvard Library Bulletin, iv (1950), pp. 293-303. * Ernest Cadman Colwell, "Cooperation or Suffocation," College and Research Libraries, x (1949), pp. 195-198, 207.

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The first of these would be from the point of view of the relation of immediacy to research. How does the scholar find his materials—by browsing in the book stack, in the catalogue, through citations, through bibliographies, etc.? What is the relationship of obsolescence of the materials to his work? Can materials be distinguished on the one hand as informative, and on the other as merely data or sources of data? Some studies of this kind are going on, and their results, though meager, all appear to provide some basis for determining size of individual collections, i.e., for estimating the comparative value, in terms of having them close at hand, of various categories of materials. The second variety of inquiry is from the point of view of finding adequate substitutes for immediacy. Interlibrary loan, we are told, is no adequate substitute. Will telefacsimile prove more nearly adequate? Experiments are actually under way. The regional depository, spatial condensation of bulky materials in micro-facsimile—these present other alternatives. Techniques of library organization should be mentioned here. Our techniques, still hardly a century old, have proved adequate, very adequate, for the organization of individual collections, but they are far from ideal, and very far for union projects. Idiosyncrasies in cataloguing and other practices—especially in subject analysis, combined with the cumbersomeness in the techniques of weeding, make it almost impossible to create a single collection out of individual collections without doing much of the work all over again—that is to say, at much too great a cost

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to make the operation inviting. In a millennial plan (and on a 200th anniversary why not speak of the millennium?) these things should be taken care of. This leads me to bibliography. Among the values of immediacy not previously mentioned are those which derive from the organization of the collection in hand. In his own institutional library, the scholar has to consult but one catalogue (or at most but a few); he gets the benefit of the library's work in selection over the years (including not only that library's staff, but also the bibliophiles whose collections have enriched it over those years); and by and large he has fair assurance of being able to see, with but brief delay, the books he chooses. Compared with this simplicity and convenience, any research which has to start with just bibliographies and end up with looking for sources for interlibrary loan would be impossibly fatiguing. Now, suppose that the single catalogue which we present to our readers could represent the selection, the organization and the availability of books in a multitude of libraries instead of just one. Would that not only at one stroke give the investigator a wider and surer reach, but also have an almost immediate salutary effect, especially in conjunction with the other substitutes to immediacy which I have mentioned, in encouraging the acquisition by individual libraries of materials not duplicated elsewhere and in promoting the avoidance of unnecessary duplication? And any such encouragement would be progress toward our command of "everything." [72]

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ELLSWORTH*

In the gray light of this cold day, it appears that both Mr. Clapp and I have had considerable difficulty in keeping to the theme of our section, the "intellectual" process. It is so easy to slide into the discussion of things which are only "semi-intellectual." Prior to World War II the debates on "comprehensiveness versus selectivity" were almost always exhortative, abstract, and always ending in platitudes about numbers of dollars available. On the surface, I think this is still true, for how can most of us with book budgets in the one to two hundred thousand dollar range—and largely tied up in journal subscriptions (and those predominantly for the sciences)—and with constantly rising binding costs for those journals, pretend that we can do anything more than buy a fair share of the new press releases and now and then engage in a little retrospective gap filling? And then if we add to these inescapable costs, the money that we have to put into the group sponsored projects—such as Human Relations Area Files, the films of Short Title Catalogue books, physical education microcards, and microprints of British Sessional Papers, or Three Centuries of English • Director of Libraries, Iowa State University.

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Plays—precious little, you see, is left over to cover the subject of this discussion, for most of us. Now in these terms, I think the debate is and has been academic. But there are a few factors to consider that make the issue a real one. First, after some fifty years of native-nurtured Ph.D. faculties, certain forces are at work—one a kind of Englishspeaking academic nationalism that leads to this kind of statement which I have heard on my own campus and elsewhere: "In my field the only really good research is done in the English language. We do not need to know how to read foreign languages." And so over the land there is a growing tendency for the graduate colleges to eliminate the foreign language requirements—based always on that nice old fallacy known to historians—the argument of silence— what you don't know doesn't trouble you. The kind of intellectual arrogance behind this kind of thinking is appalling to us librarians and we tend to ignore it and to continue importing those publications our faculties say do not exist or are of no importance. But should we? Why not take the easy way out? Why not cancel our subscriptions to these things and spend the money on books and journals in the English language and thus build even semi-exhaustive collections in our own native tongues? The temptation is great, but, to the credit of our profession, we have read Paul Shorey and we have not forgotten. And then, of course, in a directly opposite view, is the increasingly apparent fact that within this century, we are seeing the rapid economic and industrial "civilizing" (quotes surround that, of course) of backward nations—

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many of whom will, before we realize it, be in a position to add to the already large quantity of research literature we shall need to acquire. For Henry Wallace's bottle of milk to every Hottentot we may receive in return ten books. Second, the specter of old-fashioned depressions hovers over us; one feels that in Philadelphia. In the thirties, the word exhaustive was not used—even at Harvard, as far as I know. Third, we are now debating the possibilities of some kind of subject priorities—or a sort of native born Farmington Plan. We have found this possible for our antiquarian special collections, but not very meaningful for our big trunk lines of research. Within each faculty any formalized setting of hierarchical levels is, at this time, an unacceptable idea, though, as we all know, on an organized basis this does happen all the time. Fourth, all that has been said about this question must now be modified in light of the economics and the technology of micro-publication, not to mention the probable possibilities of Ultrafax, and Mother Dionne, etc. T h e machine has already modified our thinking on the question of completeness and undoubtedly would do so more extensively, if we librarians would put and keep our minds on the possibility. Instead, when someone like Alton Keller comes up with a new idea for mechanized control of serial records, we say "how fascinating," but do we examine his idea for all it is worth and do we proceed to that task quickly? No indeed, we prefer to argue about such things as rules for using manuscripts, or other important topics, [75]

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but topics which we could postpone for a rainy day. Or when Luther Evans and his colleagues invite our attention to such critical questions as the future directions of the national Union Catalog, how best to complete the full cycle of bibliographic tools and services so that proper evaluation could be made of the services like the Subject Catalog of the Library of Congress and existing regional library catalogues and organizations, when those questions are brought up we are inclined to be silent. T h e questions, Mr. Evans has been trying to get us to see, must be faced and answered before the debate on "selectivity versus completeness" can be carried deeply enough to mean very much. Then, in the fifth place, this business of cooperative acquisition and storage. This well-worn veteran of many debates is the most talked about and, I think, the least understood of all the new factors now germane to our topic. Let me illustrate my contention by citing some examples of the kind of problems we are trying to face up to in our Midwest Inter-Library Center program. Most of us now understand that centralized cooperative storage of already owned little used materials is not a matter of great importance, though well worth our attention for a time, whereas decentralized cooperative storage, we realize, is more important and cooperative acquisition is the most important element. In other words, in the midwest area, I suppose, it does not matter too much how we store what we already own as long as we are linked by teletype and a staff in our Center, but, as soon as we can

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get on with the job of pooling our buying from here on out, we can begin to make our combined libraries the richest research center in the world. I would now modify that to "one of the richest centers" in the world; that is the influence of Philadelphia. At the moment we are trying to reach agreement on a plan for purchasing film copies of all the newspaper titles our respective libraries would like to have in the Center and therefore in the area. As soon as this is done, and I think it will be done soon, each of us can stop binding and preserving in our own libraries the issues of the papers that will be available in the Center on film, except, of course, for our local papers and the two Times. Each of our collections will be selective, but the Center's (and therefore ours) will be exhaustive. This acquisition technique, if continued vigorously—and we think it will be—will soon even be understood and appreciated by our faculties, because they will see that it offers them primary source material in their own back yard which they have not had up until now. Of course, there are dangers that we all must watch in this kind of enterprise: In the first place, in deciding what to store centrally, we could easily confuse age with vitality or the lack thereof. It is the books—the old ones and the new ones—that have lost their carbon-14 that can be stored centrally—if anything can. But no Geiger counter exists for this measurement as of now, except old-fashioned human judgment. [77]

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Secondly, if we should lose our zeal for building at home the kind of special collections that have been the glory of our libraries—at least some of them—the loss would be tragic. Thirdly, we must be sure to keep our heads very clear on the distinction between the regional and the national base to use for bibliographic tools and services versus book handling. And to be specific, I maintain that as things now stand in the year 1951 (and, of course, everybody agrees with this position) there is little need for pursuing the idea of regional bibliographic services and organizations and tools, although ten years ago there was such a need, but book handling, on the other hand, can best be done on a regional basis. It is the job of our bibliographic tools and services to tell us what books exist relevant to the task in hand. It is the job of our regional organizations to so guide our library economy that needed books can be made to exist in the region. Unless we librarians see these distinctions very clearly and very soon, we can make some frightful errors. How does this new factor affect research in a region? In the first place, it makes research available and possible for reasons stated. T h e material is there. Secondly, from that it follows that we can raise the quality level of our faculties, because we can attract men to our region which we could not otherwise attract. In the third place, it can lead to further steps in inter[78]

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institutional cooperation—exchange of students, and faculty, and curricula, and publishing organizations, in fact for everything except athletes; this may prove to be a by-product that is more important than anything else. How does this factor affect the concept of selectivity versus completeness? In two specific and clear ways: It permits local selectivity and regional exhaustiveness. It encourages and should encourage the growth of special collections, particularly in the historical and literary fields that nourish scholarship and local pride and prestige. In summary, I have tried to say simply that the age-old debate on the question of "completeness versus selectivity" is largely a sterile exercise in verbal virtuosity unless it is considered in the light of such contemporary concepts as the increasing massiveness of literature, the development of a biblio-technology and the proper balancing of the use of the national and regional unit for bibliographic control and for book handling. These are not new ideas. At the moment we do not need any more new ideas. We need to use the ones we have. DISCUSSION am going to approach the subject of "comprehensiveness versus selectivity" from the point of view of a student, not a librarian. I am a mediaevalist and my major interest is the literature written in England from ALBERT BAUGH:* I

* Felix E. Schilling Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.

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the Norman conquest to the close of the Middle Ages. That involves a number of collateral interests. I am naturally interested in linguistics because so many of the problems that arise in connection with mediaeval literature involve also questions of linguistic change, dialect differences, and the like. And I am also interested in a number of other literatures because much of Middle English literature in this period is secondary and derivative, and one must know almost as much about old French literature and Italian and Latin literature in the Middle Ages as about his own if one is to get below the surface. And then I am also necessarily interested in those political and social conditions which are an essential background and a controlling factor in the creation of this literature. In other words, I think I present a fairly typical case of one who is working in the humanities. One of the great differences between us and those who work in the sciences—chemists and physicists and biologists—is that much of the material that we work on lies in the past, whereas the scientist works on material that is wholly in the present. That is to say, his laboratory equipment and his chemical elements and his biological specimens, and so on are contemporary, current, modern specimens. For us the library has to be the laboratory as well as the research tool providing a key to the results of previous scholarship. T h e book needs of the scientist, I think, are largely met by an extensive collection of journals and the current scientific literature of his subject, whereas we need not only that current material, but we need the original texts and the documents and all those materials [80]

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that go to build up the historical past. T h e ideal situation in which we would find ourselves, of course, would be to have everything, but my experience as a student is tempered also by some twenty years of experience as a member of the Library Committee of the University of Pennsylvania and I know that the ideal is unattainable. Now there is one point of view in which both speakers this morning seem to me to agree completely, and that is that completeness is impossible, at least in all fields. Therefore some sort of selectivity is inevitable, and the question really resolves itself into what kind of selectivity, what the basis of this selection shall be. There are one or two points on which probably all would agree and then one or two in which there is probably room for a difference of opinion. I think we would all agree that there is need in a research library for the basic tools—the bibliographies, the works of reference, the imporant serials—and I think that everyone would agree that these have to be kept up, no matter what else we are able to do. There are, however, certain other categories in which my thinking leads me to believe there should be a distribution of the remaining funds according to certain principles. There is first of all, I think, the necessity for acquiiing the important books that currently come out in all fields or nearly all fields. T h e purchase of those books when they come out is really an economical way of anticipating the needs of the future as well as our immediate requirements, because we have all had the experience of finding that a book which was not bought at the time it appeared goes out [81]

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of print and five or ten or twenty years later, when we try to acquire it, we have to pay twice or sometimes many times as much for it. The second of these categories, in which I would like to see the selective purchase of books carried out, is in certain fields where a more particular effort could be made to build specialized collections. T o me the best way for a university library to build specialized collections in certain fields is to follow the lead, the needs, the present demands of those members of its faculties who are working in those particular fields. Perhaps in some cases it would be necessary to consult local pride and keep up specialized collections in certain areas which were of importance locally. But, leaving aside such considerations for the moment, I have the feeling that in those libraries that I know well, and they are six or eight, the best collections are those that have been built up because there was at the institution over a period of years someone who was interested particularly in some particular field. I can think for example of a small but excellent library near Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr College, which has some excellent collections; those collections are excellent because they had men who were interested, for example, in Old French literature, in Middle English literature, where for years Carleton Brown was the professor, in mediaeval history, where there has been a succession of active and distinguished scholars, and as a result in those particular fields the library is strong. We have certain special fields in which our Library is strong for similar reasons. We have, for example, a very fine collection

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of early American drama because the pioneer in the study of early American drama is Professor Quinn, who is one of our men. Forty years ago, when I began working in the field of my interest, we did not have any catalogues of manuscripts worth speaking of, and in my particular work I need catalogues of manuscripts. I know of one librarian, not at Pennsylvania, who once said: "Why should we buy catalogues of manuscripts? We do not have the manuscripts." But nowadays with microfilm and photostat and all the other mechanical means of obtaining reproductions, catalogues of manuscripts are primary tools. So we began buying with the help of my old teacher, Professor Child, the catalogues of manuscripts in as many of the English libraries as we could. Today we have all of the catalogues. We have every one with the exception of one part of the catalogue of the Phillips Collection which is, or was, after all, a private collection. That catalogue was printed by a private press and therefore is the object of collector interest by men who do not care much about what is inside the book, but must have a complete representation of the Middle Hill Press. T h e result is that it is a very scarce book and very expensive, and, while we have two of the three parts, we can only hope that some day we can get the third. But we have built that collection up over a period of forty years until it is now one of the best collections in this part of the country, if not in the country as a whole. There are certain advantages, as I see it, of this procedure. One is that the library has the benefit of the experience and the enthusiasm of that member of the faculty [83]

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who is interested in the particular field. If he has any of the collector instinct himself, and I have been a collector from the time I was old enough to collect cigarette cards, there is a kind of ambition that the collector has of picking up a desirable item today and watching the catalogues for things he wants. Over the years, that results in the acquisition of many books that could not be got if the librarian said "Lo, I will go out and acquire these things." You have to watch for them; you have to pick them up when you come across them. T o have someone on the faculty who is looking for those things and who is ordering them for the library is one of the greatest benefits, it seems to me, that the library can derive from this procedure. There is a disadvantage, and we may as well face the disadvantage, that collections of this kind could easily become moribund. That is to say, when the particular member of the faculty retires, or dies, or leaves to go somewhere else, there may be no one to carry on that particular collection, and for a time it may suffer. That is where the librarian should step in and, I think, as a result of experience here at Pennsylvania, that the librarian does step in. I think that if I should no longer be able to continue my efforts to complete the collection of manuscript catalogues—and I am still filling in the European, the continental collections— I know that the librarian—the librarians, I'll put it in the plural—are sufficiently aware of the value of that collection, of the position that it has attained, to really keep it up and to try to carry on until the next man comes along who is interested in that particular thing. I think that our Clothier [84]

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Collection of American plays has attained such a position as a collection that the librarians will again try to keep it up, even after Dr. Quinn is no longer here to help. There is finally a third in my three supplementary categories. The money for this category might be called the luxury fund—a fund for collectors' items, rare books. I think that we ought to have a little of our money to spend on an occasional manuscript or rare book which will not be used by too many people but which adds materially to the total resources of a library and which seems to me to be like the icing on the cake. Perhaps this special luxury fund might be broad enough to include money that could be used to take advantage of special opportunities to acquire desirable items or collections for which ordinarily we would not feel that we had the funds, that would not be justified as a part of the ordinary departmental appropriations in the book budget. Now the allocation of funds among these four classes of material must be of course determined by special conditions. For example, the first category—tools, journals, current materials—may loom very large, may consume threefourths or nine-tenths of the funds of a library in which there is a special limitation of interest such as law or economics and where the current materials are voluminous and important and must be kept up to date. As for the other three categories—general representative collections in all fields, highly developed collections in certain fields, and the luxury items—the distribution of funds among these, it seems to me, will have to be determined by local [85]

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conditions and particular times. I suppose that the last, the luxury item, will always be the last to receive consideration, because we must provide the necessities first, and we can have the luxuries only if there is a little left over. But it seems to me that a library which never buys any of those luxuries, which never can afford them, is like the family that must always live on ham and cabbage and can never have an occasional artichoke or a strawberry shortcake. I would like to hope that a little of the money in every university library budget could be spared for manuscripts and early editions. I would sum up my thinking by saying that a desirable distribution of book funds for a research library in the humanities would provide for (1) basic tools such as bibliographies, important serials, and the like; (2) the most important books in most fields; (3) special collections in those fields where special work is being done by members of the faculty or staff; and (4) a modest but steady addition to the collection of rarer books and manuscripts. Ellsworth claims for a regional system —or perhaps a galaxy of systems—the solution to the problem of comprehensiveness. Clapp points to the issue of immediacy 1 as crucial to "everything" versus "something," D O N A L D CONEY:*

* Librarian, University of California (Berkeley). I I should like to claim the senatorial privilege of extending my remarks in print. President Eliot, in 1902, wrote a gloss on "immediacy" worth repeating: "The student and the general reader alike should be willing to await the delivery of the book he wants for hours or even days, just as the naturalist waits for the season at which his particular material is to be

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and proposes a re-estimate of immediacy in the light of scholarly behavior, book transportation, and a published national Union Catalog (I wish to bring that out of its skillful concealment in his paper). By some combination of all of these a great stride toward the acquiring of "everything" may be taken. But all this handles comprehensiveness only on a national or global basis. "Everything" can be present in the region, the nation, or the world. The immediacy of its need can be estimated in terms of its relation to research, it can be known through bibliographies, and it can be transmitted with commendable, but not instant, speed. The dragon of comprehensiveness appears to have been slain. But what books shall we have in our uncomprehensive single libraries? What books must there be for those who move in the orbit of my library building? How shall we select those books? The dragon of "everything" is not really dead until we have fashioned the lance of selectivity—and used it. Let me offer this proposition: that for local ownership we undertake to supply the current needs of the present scholars.2 I propose, further, that we prefer sources to works which rest on those sources. This for the obvious found, or for the time of year when his plant flowers, or his moths escape from the chrysalis, or his chickens or his trout hatch." C. W. Eliot " T h e Division of a Library," Library Journal, xxvii, no. 7, p. C51. 21 do not mean, of course, that one should wait for a book to be demanded and then run out and try to buy it. We have to guess ahead a little—but we should be able to reckon with some precision from a base line to be found in our own faculties.

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reason that more needs can be satisfied per dollar of source material than can be satisfied per dollar of secondary material. I would modify these proposals to whatever extent an encompassing regional library system might require in the common interest. I propose that teachers and librarians collaborate in the study of scholarly need for, and behavior* toward, booksneeds of the whole genus of scholars, species by species by subspecies, ad infinitum. In this connection I propose that we rear up a tribe of library attached persons skilled in the discovery of scholars' needs, as expressed directly by the scholar himself and as expressed through the books themselves in citations and bibliographies, in other works by the same author, and in cognate books. T h e whole problem of collection building is so colored by decisions of degree—there are so many variables—that we cannot pass a law nor map with a firm precise line the exact limits of our selective collections. T h e best we can do is to take a position and establish a focus. I have proposed that we establish the focus of our collections by reflecting the needs of our present faculties. Im8 "Need" derives from the individuals of any faculty group and refers to books. By "behavior," however, is meant the way scholars use books—it must differ from scholarly kind to kind. Certainly the chemists's approach is different from the lawyer's. We know also that individuals vary: Professor X dives into a welter of books with his seminar, exposing the messy process of scholarship; while Professor V relies on the power of words, keeping his classroom pure of books. Knowledge of behavior is probably more useful in organizing books, and access thereto, than in selection

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plicit in this focus is a position we might well take: that we regard collections of books not as entities having shapes, sizes, and completenesses, of value in themselves, but rather as collections which are designed to satisfy as specific needs as we are able to determine.

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SHOULD LIBRARIES PASSIVE INSTRUMENTS PARTICIPANTS

HARRY

M.

IN,

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LYDENBERG

*

IKE any other discussion this calls first for definition of terms and for acceptance of limits, but here and now I venture to think it fair to assume that we accept the library as a collection of books hopefully gathered and administered for studies of importance. And we look on research as a hopeful effort to extend knowledge plus an effort to interpret facts and information already accepted. Degrees of importance or success for either side must vary with opinion and judgment (and the good temper or disposition?) of observer and observed; though all will doubtless concede that every subject used as example must be accepted as important—at least, in the opinion of the man offering it—until and unless it be proven to the contrary. And, as one more preliminary, let me say plainly at the very start where I stand on such a matter, rather than take the time to begin by question and answer for development of theme and reply in logical fashion. • Director (1934-41), T h e New York Public Library.

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I for one can not see how any library fit to be called such can be a "passive instrument" when research of any kind is concerned or when the daily life of the institution comes into the picture. Its first duty in all its relations to the community it serves is study of the needs of that community, followed by study of how it is best to meet those needs, develop its collections, administer those collections, arrange its displays and exhibitions, make its materials known, educate its staff, aim all its activities at such ends. T h e very care of its building, the fabric, its cleaning, likewise the care of its books and other materials and instruments is sure to suffer sadly if not irreparably, if any passive, any "wait and see," attitude is permitted. And if such studies are not examples, shining examples, of research, I pause for reply as to what we are to call them. Not necessarily ivory tower research, but nonetheless an effort to solve a problem of no small significance or importance. Did our scheme of classification, our system of cataloguing, our general principles of administration that mark the typical research library of today come down to us from on high as examples of inspiration or rather as result of study and more study, experimentation and more experimentation, research and more research? True, none of them as I recall may have come as result of working for a doctorate as such, and true it is that much of the work for the higher degrees in our field have had impressive and helpful results for us in our daily lives, but what I am trying to say is that I feel every fibre of our industry, every [91]

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element of our library technique as it stands today came as result of active participation in research by forebears and by such of their successors as we like to think of as typical. This research is not confined to the scholarly institutions by any means. Take, for example, the study of reading tastes made by Charles Compton in the Saint Louis Public Library, or the somewhat similar studies done by Douglas Waples and his associates. How much help they thus gave to publishers and writers and other book men is not the question. They all show an earnest and sincere effort to interpret public tastes as shown by the books used by the public, certainly not without interest to psychologists and sociologists, cerainly not to be disregarded simply because they were made in the course of daily work rather than as laboratory assignments or as the result of wrinkling of eyebrows and announcement of determination to head an expedition to search for "the" truth. Accepting books as they drift in is "passive" enough and perhaps free from undue physical or mental effort, but how many research libraries worthy of the name can be set down in such a class? Any library today serving a community and owning to any interest in scholarly studies must be following a well-defined field of acquisition, must be measuring with care the results of the efforts to that end, must be looking at it with the objective view of the biologist studying his microscope or the mathematician working with his equations. Look at the problem in more detail. What are the dominant influences in this development ol collections? The amount of money on hand. T h e demands [92]

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of faculty and other users. T h e enthusiasm and persistence of "born collectors." T h e imaginative forestalling of future demands. All these, and others. Here as elsewhere it boils down to a question of team-play, a sense of balance, an uncommon measure of common sense, all and more. Is it too soon to feel that the extent and spread of the Farmington Plan is already showing itself? Behind and below and fundamentally a part of this and of any systematic development of research collections is the determination to stop useless and harmful duplication and waste, thus to develop better rounded collections of source material for the country as a whole rather than for a given institution. T h e library here is certainly no "passive instrument of research." One more example or instance of active participation comes to mind in the way such institutions as the John Carter Brown Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the university libraries at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the Sutro Branch of the State Library in San Francisco, others in the West, the Clements Library, historical collections such as those of the American Antiquarian Society and others like it, too many others to mention though readily at our lips, help by their publication of source material they own. How can anyone on an extensive study of American life fail to bow down before the list of American newspapers given us by Clarence Brigham? Or fail to rejoice at the way Randolph Adams brought to the scholars of this country the material at their command, thanks to his development and continuation of the tradition and

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example begun by Mr. Clements? Or what the Library of Congress has to its credit because of the sympathy and understanding shown by Mr. Putnam and his two brilliant successors? The Rosenbach Lectures here, the R. R. Bowker Lectures in New York, the Lowell Lectures in Boston show active participation in research by libraries. In music the concerts and related publications given us by the Library of Congress, thanks to Mrs. Coolidge, stand out as shining peaks. Some of us incline to believe that the bulletins and similar publications of the Harvard Library, the New York Historical Society, so many others like them, are not wholly without interest to librarians and scholars the country over. And when the University of Michigan set out to develop its papyri we find a striking example of the librarian's working in the field with the professor and instructor. Think of how the libraries of this Philadelphia region joined forces to bring forth their union catalogue, or the similar instruments developed for the Rocky Mountain and the Pacific Northwest sections. Libraries were far from passive to those ends. I know not how to fix an absolute measure to the good done to scholarship and research in this country by what Charles Hastings did by means of the printed card distribution by the Library of Congress and by the national Union Catalog, but I am sure it calls for ardent thanks and warm appreciation. 1 And I am i It was unfortunate, not to say inexcusable, to fail to say from the platform that here in Philadelphia is going on a striking example of active participation in research by a library, that of the "American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for promoting Useful Knowledge.'* In the fields of American history, linguistics of the native Indian tribes, American

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sure all will agree that it would be sadly inexcusable to fail to think of the pioneer work done by Ralph Shaw in studying recent developments in electrical and electronic and mechanical science for application to routine library processes. Immediate results lie before us; future possibilities stir the imagination. So too, it may not be unfair to call to mind the thought and experimenting given by some libraries to and for the preservation of present-day fragile paper and for perpetuation of important messages given us so often on such unstable and evanescent material. One thing more: the current studies by libraries and librarians on the problem of photography as a savior of, even a substitute for, our present typography. If these are not examples of active participation in research, pray tell me what they are! Research, like most of our present-day activities, is no longer the task of the solitary scholar in his laboratory or at his study desk. Einstein could give us a formula, but it took unprecedented teamwork by many others to develop our present control of the atom. Newton, Copernicus, Galileo are solitary figures, but their days are not our days. Here and now the advancement of science—scientia in its widest sense—calls for many minds and hands. No worker on any project can do his best without intimate and archeology, and kindred subjects it has to its credit real contributions. T h e letters between Franklin and his sister, Jane Mecom, edited by Carl Van Doren, another series between Franklin and Catharine Ray Greene, edited by William Greene Roelker, stand out; as well as studies in the linguistics of our Indian tongues by Marius Barbeau, D. F. Voeglin, John Witthoft; plenty of others, come to mind as instructive instances.

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reliable knowledge of what his fellows outside his ken have said and done in his field. How is he to get this reliably and completely except through a library? If he has none near at hand the odds are against him, the handicap is strong if not disqualifying. How is the library to be an "active participant" in such tasks? How can the library take active part in such research? Here again it is a matter of team play. The librarian must let the workers know how anxious he is to learn of the weakness of his service, how eager he is to improve his present offerings of help. The worker himself must put his problems sympathetically and plainly understandably before the librarian. Am I wrong in thinking that some if not many workers in such fields as we have heard about are ignorant of, if not indifferent to, the help the library offers? The librarian is partly to blame. How much is due to lack of mental alertness, not to say to sluggishness, on the part of the worker needs no measuring here and now. Few college or university libraries fail to greet incoming undergraduates with a welcome and a talk on how they are best to use the books. Some of us happily and instinctively turn to books as first aid. Some of the rest of us, we admit, now and then say, "Why, I never thought of that!" when we come to learn how much help the library records can give. Teacher and instructor can help much if in assignments for term papers and theses the pupil is urged first to try the sources at his command and next to check with the librarian as to how completely the pupil has covered them. [96]

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Ask yourselves how many instructors in a given field come to mind as knowing much about the printed sources at command outside of their immediate specialty? How many actively practicing physicians when faced with an unusual case go beyond the books on their own shelves or in their local library? What is the purpose of the Army Medical Library if not to help? Is it wholly needless to urge that graduate schools ask the librarian to repeat his greeting to freshmen on a more detailed and intimate basis? Would any librarian worth his salt fail to jump at such a chance? Yes, I know that "bibliographies" hung on a thesis may represent little more than painful copying of catalogue cards most readily at hand. A helpful bibliography can and may be much more than a mere listing. It can point out essential and fundamental sources, tell about secondhand material, do its best to show a man whither to turn for help and what may be avoided with little danger as to thoroughness. I do not know how far back goes the prayer pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt, but I do know that it was Marcus Tullius Cicero who reminded us that "to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child." And some of us think ignorance of what has been written at an earlier date about the problem we now are studying may well justify some such phrasing. No, I for one cannot see how the ideal library can do anything but consider itself, insist upon itself, as an "active participant" in research. The library is an organic instrument, a being with life pulsing in its veins. It may sleep and rest like other organisms, but too much sleep, too long [97]

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a dormant period is dangerous. Death lurks close at hand. For a library as well as for you and me.

DISCUSSION It is a great pleasure to find my old friend Mr. Lydenberg among those present and to listen to his wise words. He is the dean of American librarians and has probably in his time done more than anyone in America to serve library users. Great as his love is for books, his love for the readers of books is greater. I do not think it has ever made much difference to him whether he was helping a high school student with his first term paper or a mature scholar with his magnum opus. But we can hardly think of research libraries and research librarians in such broad humanistic terms. If we do, we open the door to the whole business of the acquisition of knowledge. CONYERS R E A D : *

I think we must limit the scope of our discussion to the research library in the more restricted sense of the term. So far in this discussion no speaker has really attempted to define a research library. I suggest that we apply the name to that type of library service designed, not for the dissemination of knowledge but for the enlargement or the extension of knowledge. A research library, I submit, is an institution designed to assist those engaged in extending the boundaries of knowledge. In these terms, we may distinguish, without attempting any elaborate classification, • Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

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two types of research libraries, those directed to the intense cultivation of a small area of learning like our special libraries and those which undertake to cover the whole field like our great university libraries. And then there are libraries which fall somewhere in between. In any attempt to talk about research libraries we have to recognize these distinctions, we have to recognize that the functions of a director of the Harvard libraries or the Princeton Library or the Yale libraries are quite different from those of the director of the College of Physicians Library or the Library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society or the Folger Library. Questions of personnel, questions of equipment, questions of what a librarian in such a library may properly do on library time and library pay will arise. Should a man who is the director of a great research library, comprehending all fields of knowledge, engage any considerable part of his time in research in a very narrow portion of one of those fields? I should suppose that the librarian of a great library would be more concerned with knowledge about knowledge than with specific research. On the other hand, I should say that, in a specialized research library like that of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which is specifically devoted to a very narrow field of interest, the more research the librarian does in his own field, the better equipped he is to advise in that field. T h e danger of the director of a large library focusing his attention on one field is precisely the same danger that Mr. Baugh has envisaged when he takes a faculty member to task who tries to spend most of the

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money of the library for his particular field. I should be inclined to discourage active research in a narrow field in the case of the librarian of a large library. T h e qualities which Charles David ought to have are somewhat different from the qualities that Louis Wright ought to have. And thank God they are in both cases. On the specific question, should libraries be passive instruments of research or active instruments of research— and now I speak simply as a user of libraries and not as one who has wrestled with the library's problem—I feel that this is a problem which has to be solved individually by each institution. I believe that, particularly in large metropolitan areas, we are going to find it desirable to encourage the establishment of more small libraries devoted to particular areas rather than the whole field of learning; we should put more emphasis on libraries like the College of Physicians and the Folger Library. It seems to me that this is the inevitable direction of growth, if we are to secure anything like completeness of research materials. In the specialized collection we may face with greater equanimity the problem of rounding of our holdings. I hesitate to say that no library specializing in Shakespeare should harbor a first folio, but they might liquidate duplicates of the first folio and turn the forty-odd thousand dollars so invested into the buying of microfilms and photostats of otherwise unobtainable and unique items. That is to say, I think the approach to a special research library should not be a collector's approach. I think it should be [100]

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a research worker's approach. We want not just what is rare, but everything that is pertinent. I do not want to discourage benevolent donors, but, if they came to me and asked me whether I would rather have a first folio or a check for forty thousand dollars, I should take the latter. T o some extent, I think, special librarians have paid a little bit too much attention to the collection of rarities and not enough attention to the covering of the field. Another problem is that of bibliographical aids. My own quarrel with libraries is the lack of good comprehensive subject catalogues. All our union catalogues, or almost all of them, are author catalogues. I admit that it is an impossibly difficult task, but, from the point of view of the research worker in special fields, I think adequate catalogues are still the great desideratum in library technique. One thing which I discovered to my delight at the Folger Library is a catalogue of dedications to books; and once in a while this leads to important information. For example, Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, wrote a pious treatise entitled Lamentations of a Sinner—as a matter of fact, she was a very well-behaved woman, but she wrote this book anyway in the last year of Henry VIII's reign; it was published just after his death in 1547. But the book was promoted by Catherine of Suffolk and William Parr of Northampton and the introduction was written by young William Cecil. It is about the first thing we have from his pen. T h e dedications of books, the people who write them, the relations of the person who writes them to the author, political and cultural alike, [101]

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are very valuable. And yet outside the Folger there are few libraries in this country where you can locate such data in the card catalogue. Finally, particularly in special libraries with large collections of rare books, I should like to make a plea for increased microfilming or photostating of rare books so as to provide the basis for extensive interlibrary loans. Obviously a library like the Huntington or the Folger cannot let their rare books go out of their hands. They are too fragile. But it would not cost a great deal, and to some extent of course it is done, to photostat or microfilm those books, make these copies available, and so enable those libraries to participate in interlibrary lending. It would save an enormous amount of effort and energy, it would not involve too great an expense, and it would greatly enlarge the services of the library to scholars all over the land. WARNER G . RICE:* Librarians, to a far greater extent than the members of most professional groups, accept their responsibilities as soldiers in the liberation war of humanity; and since, like most men of our century, they feel sure not only that this war must ultimately be fought on the ideological level, but also that the extension of human knowledge is essential to the development of human wisdom, they are committed to the support of research. At the outset, then, it appears that the question now under * Director of General Library; Chairman, English Department, University of Michigan.

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discussion permits of only one answer; and surely no member of this audience will be surprised if I begin by declaring a hearty agreement with the views which Mr. Lydenberg has expressed both judiciously and eloquently. He has made the points which need to be emphasized. But I can add, perhaps, a few footnotes. The propositions which I propose briefly to discuss are these: First, speaking as a university librarian, I am constrained to think that neither librarians nor libraries can take the lead in directing research operations; their business is to support such operations. Second, I believe that stimulating experts to point the way in building collections is the librarian's clear responsibility. (By an emphasis on "stimulating," I show, I suppose, the slight difference from the point of view expressed by Mr. Baugh.) Teaching and training research workers so that they may get the most out of the library's facilities is another obligation, and the third of my points. It is only through a discipline of this kind that we can get the help we need in solving our bibliographical problems. Fourth, the librarian must be sensitive to new tendencies and interests in research, and anticipate them when he can. And last, since library cooperation, desirable though it be in view of rising costs and demands, is still remote in practice, librarians have a long job of propagandizing ahead. They must keep cooperative plans alive in the midst of persons who are not specifically interested in library economy. My own outlook as a librarian has been rather restricted; the only kind of library I know well is the University of [103]

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Michigan Library; and the credentials which I present, on an occasion like this, are established by my experience as a practicing scholar, and as a teacher and director of graduate students—experience which I have found extremely useful in the conduct of my present duties. In the double role which I try to fill I have made some observations which may be pertinent. These, if correct, cast some shadows on the validity of assumptions which, if I understood them correctly, some our our earlier speakers have made. First, since university libraries are many things besides research libraries, it is dangerous to assume that they will retain their present position as the chief repositories for research materials. (This possibility has just been alluded to by Professor Read.) University libraries, as everybody knows, operate study halls, undergraduate reading rooms, reserve collections, and provide other services in connection with teaching programs. They also engage, through extension departments and by other means, in those developments of public relations, adult education and the like which make up an increasing part of a modern university's contribution to the social service function which institutions of higher learning are now committed to carry out. Such service takes a larger and larger part of the budgets available to us. I cannot see any likelihood that this load will diminish, much less that it will be cut off. Even in that happy day when most teaching is done by audio-visual aids, we in the libraries will either take over part of this responsibility or have to give up some of our funds to those who do. Accordingly, it follows that primacy [104]

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in research collections may very well pass to special libraries—I should say especially to those which are sup ported by major industries and corporations. Thus I have some doubts whether in another generation the University of Michigan Library can rival, in some scientific fields at least, libraries of the Dow Chemical Company or General Motors. The scale on which those organizations operate is far beyond the scale which I am able even to imagine. We may hope that big business and the government will support university collections, as Mr. Williams suggested yesterday they should, but I am not sure that they will, and I see a number of reasons why they will not. Perhaps the moral is that academic research libraries should become more fully aware of the potentialities of their neighbor libraries in industry, and they should include these libraries in their planning to a degree which has not yet been undertaken. But I return to university libraries. When I took up my present position the President of the University of Michigan suggested to me that I might very well organize and carry out a program of research in the Library of the University. He was led to this view, I think, by his own experience as an administrator of a great museum and the director of its research, and his proposal was, of course, appealing. Yet I declined the suggestion, and I have not yet regretted the decision then made. In my opinion the development of a program of research as a principal activity of a university library is unwise. No: it is cooperation toward the success of programs [105]

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organized by scholars outside the library which I take to be our principal business. The library, as an institution, exists chiefly not to direct or conduct research, but to aid it. Our obligation is to collect, organize, describe, and make accessible the materials which scholarship requires. It is, of course, true that such operations cannot be carried forward by persons who lack the scholar's conscience for accuracy and thoroughness, or who are deficient in the scholar's qualities of learning, imagination, and judgment. There is, however, a difference in degree if not in kind. Let me be specific. A useful distinction can be made, I think, between reference service (which the library can and should give) and research assistance (which lies outside its scope). That is, librarians can explain the ways in which knowledge is organized, help the scholar to discover materials, and point out to him the advantages of such new techniques as the use of microfilm, microcards, etc. But the librarian can scarcely be expected, in these days of highly specialized scholarship, to be sufficiently expert to make definitive judgments as to the value of the ideas, the data, which have been put on record by scholars. We may argue as much as we like the value of synoptic views. We may urge the need of syntheses of knowledge. We shall not, we cannot, effectively attain these ideals on the large scale in any future which I can contemplate. Knowledge will be continually fragmented and the fragments will be atomized. Nobody can fairly expect a librarian, beyond all other experts, to be the superman who puts Humpty Dumpty together again. And, therefore, if preliminary

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work by way of making abstracts, translations, deciding what is a promising suggestion and what is not is wanted by an investigator, he had better get a subject specialist, not a librarian, to assist him. I am glad to observe, of course, that the training of librarians includes more and more attention to subject fields; but it seems to me unlikely that most of them will qualify as experts, and I am bound to add (ungracious though this may sound) that the training offered them in research methods by schools of library science is not always of a kind which qualifies them to judge soundly in such matters. T h e research activities undertaken by an individual librarian will certainly aid him in assisting others in the field of his special competence and there is, of course, the place for the special library which Mr. Read has just defined. What I am arguing now is that on the whole the economy of the university research library should not, and cannot, be expected to make regularly available, for research assistance, the services of many specialists. Again, I believe that the building of research collections should be largely directed by persons who are giving their principal efforts directly to advanced studies. The library must constantly stimulate and encourage such persons to accept their responsibilities in this connection, a task not very easy to carry out. The librarian must use his influence, now to stir up, now to restrain, particular enthusiasms. We need more attention to the mechanisms of this business. I have always admired the arrangements at the University of Chicago, where there is provision for library-faculty [107]

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appointments; and I have some success at Michigan in attaching faculty men for brief periods to the library staff. In any case we have the experts at hand. We must find the ways to use them. The necessity for training research workers to appreciate the extent and nature of the library's resources and facilities has been touched upon by Mr. Zirkle, Mr. Lydenberg and others, and well merits special treatment. T h e library's potentialities as a teaching agency have not yet been exploited properly; and here again, in a university at least, the best hope lies in working through, and with, the teaching faculties in cooperation, not in trying to take over the job completely. In this connection I should like to remark that the world just now seems to be full of erudite, earnest, energetic, but relatively ill-informed zealots who, inspired by a pamphlet on bibliographical control or a speech regretting a lack of it uttered at some meeting or other of a professional society, request research grants for vast bibliographical projects which are set in motion without consultation with librarians or any adequate survey of the knowledge we have accumulated about such techniques as indexing and classification. Dulce bellum inexpertis! Let us seek the help of those enthusiasts who strive in this manner to improve the condition of affairs, let us make use of their special gifts, but let us remind them that we are experienced and let us convince them that we are open-minded. Let us not allow them to waste thousands of dollars on ill-conceived schemes or to intro[108]

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duce a variety of amateurish systems which will make our confusions worse confounded. T o take up another of Mr. Lydenberg's ideas, or perhaps I ought to say a New York Public Library idea, since Mr. Beats also stressed it, I should like to say again that the responsibility which rests upon principal members of any research library's staff for keeping in touch with types of research of importance to the institution which it serves, and with new developments in major fields, is a heavy and pressing one. I think we must all be guessing what is coming next. T o be specific, I am now giving a good deal of time to a consideration of the changes in scholarship which seem to show that (relatively speaking) humanistic studies are going to decline and that not only the exact, but also the social, sciences will rise to greater and greater prominence. If this is to be true, must we not diminish the attention we have given, in the building of our collections, to history, literature, philosophy, and stress other things? If the change of direction (which I think inevitable) is to come, it will have implications for all library economy, since I am persuaded that in the sciences and social sciences relatively less attention need be given to historical considerations and to collections of historical value than is the case where the humanities are concerned. So that we can then properly substitute more microfilm and microprint for documents, reports, and other materials so important in the compilation of statistics and the shaping of graphs today, so unimportant tomorrow. [109]

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Considerations of this kind lead straight back to such questions as those which Mr. Clapp and Mr. Ellsworth have vigorously attacked. We all want more cooperation, more cooperation between libraries, between institutions. But we must remember that faculties are not motivated as we are, we must be patient, we must try to convince them of the validity of our claims and views in the face of their own special interests, and this, I warn you, is a long-time job. By way of summary, let me reiterate my opinion that a knowledge of what is going on in research, a flexible policy looking toward the development of new resources and a corresponding vigor in tapering off in areas where research cannot profitably be continued, may fairly be expected of the librarian and his staff. His business, as I see it, is to be a step ahead of the demand, if possible, to have the required books, journals, and documents ready when they are wanted, and to make them quickly available if he does not possess them already. He must organize the materials in his charge, he must help the scholar to understand and use the facilities which he has provided. He must extend these facilities through the development of wellconsidered schemes of cooperation. If he can do so much, his responsibility as a coadjutor in university research will be adequately discharged—and his contribution recognized. Mr. Rice's presentation was followed by a lively discussion in which Messrs. Read, White and Zirkle partook. The main questions raised were:

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Is the pessimism regarding the future of humanistic studies justified? (Read) What training in research methods are library schools giving which should be changed? (White) Can a library perform its function of knowing what it has and of making its materials available to the scholar, without a considerable amount of library research? (Zirkle)

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WILSON

HAT Type Research Librarian? Against the background of the papers and discussions of this Symposium that have thrown into high relief the importance, complexity, and problems of research libraries, I am assigned the task of answering the question, "What type research librarian?" Specifically, I am asked to answer the questions whether research librarians should be scholars whose minds have been conditioned by long experience in research; and should they be encouraged to participate actively in research? Or should they be administrators, highly competent in the organization of large and expensive enterprises (men who "can get things done") ? Or should they be technicians, expert in the minutiae of technical processes? Or, finally, should they be primarily promotors? Or, as an afterthought, should they perhaps be educators? Not an "Or" But an "And" Proposal. In answering these questions, which have already been considered in part in the foregoing discussion, I can do little more than express an individual opinion, a procedure that librarians have * University of North Carolina; Dean Emeritus, Graduate Library School, University of Chicago.

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followed all too frequently and that unfortunately holds out little probability of illuminating the subject and providing a solution of the problem. Nevertheless, I shall answer them in the light of my experience as a librarian, as a director for ten years of a library school that emphasized the importance of training librarians for research libraries, and as a surveyor of and prescriber for such libraries when they have encountered administrative or other difficulties. The terms scholar, administrator, technician, promotor, and educator, used by the organizer of the Symposium were not intended, I assume, to be mutually exclusive, though there have been and there are those who think of them as such. Individuals from each of these categories, and from other categories, with different types and amounts of general education, graduate and professional training, and experience, have administered research libraries in the past and will be needed to direct the highly complex and intricate service required of them tomorrow. My first answer, then, is that the research librarian need not be a scholar or an administrator, but rather a scholar and an administrator, as well as a technician, a promotor, and an educator. After all, it is the qualities and abilities of the individual that count rather than the label he wears. In my opinion, all of these qualities and abilities may be embraced in the comprehensive term "librarianship," to which librarians may devote themselves unreservedly in the conviction that by so doing they can make their greatest contribution to society. [113]

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My second answer is that the categories mentioned do not comprise all the types of individuals and qualities and abilities desired in the research librarian. At an early period, the specifications submitted by the employers of research librarians may have called for only the technician with personality. Later they called for the technician and administrator; then for the administrator, technician, and scholar. Then the educator and the promotor were added. Today the formula runs somewhat like this: an individual is wanted with high intelligence, fine personality, wide educational interests, and an understanding of how the library can contribute to the advancement of educational and research programs; he must have imagination, sound common sense, and intellectual drive. These are basic even if they are all too rare. He should also be an experienced, capable administrator and a dynamic leader. Scholarship, knowledge of languages, understanding of the spirit of research, and ability to engage in fruitful research or to direct members of his staff in it, are likewise set down sometimes as fundamental requirements. Frequently, it is also insisted that the librarian shall have a broad, humanistic outlook on books and all that enriches life, or that he shall have had training in research in the social and natural sciences, in order that he may be able to attack experimentally the problems confronting him with greater prospect of solving them. Type of Librarian Determined by the Nature of Position. These are general or idealistic qualifications. Such librarians as they describe are, like the ideal university [114]

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president, rarely to be found. Now, to be more specific, I shall point out qualities and abilities that should be possessed by the director and other members of the research library staff who fill the more important positions of associate and assistant directors and division and department heads. The abilities of all members of the staff combined are required if maximum efficiency is to be attained. As the papers presented at this Symposium have demonstrated, the matters with which the director of a major research library must deal are extremely varied and complex. If they are to be handled effectively, it seems to me that the librarian should be first of all an experienced administrator of vision and leadership who has had considerable academic, professional, and educational training. His total academic and professional training should be as extensive and as exacting as that provided through curricula leading to the doctorate, including knowledge of research methods and an understanding of the spirit of research. A fundamental weakness of librarianship in the past has stemmed from the lack of librarians who have undergone training in librarianship of this range and exacting nature. For a director of a research library devoted to a more limited field, such as the Clements or Folger libraries, with a corresponding limitation of administrative responsibility, emphasis may well be shifted from administrative ability and extensive knowledge of librarianship to exacting scholarly attainment in the subject field, proficiency in research, and experience in teaching and publication. [115]

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For associate or assistant librarians and other staff members in charge of major divisions and departments, qualities similar to those demanded of the head librarian may be required. I shall illustrate with three positions: 1. The assistant librarian in charge of technical services will find it advantageous to be more of the technician than of the scholar or the administrator. Knowledge of the technical processes involved, training in research, and ability in experimentation in solving technical problems will be essential to the efficient performance of his duties. Even so, he should be an administrator as well, since he must direct the activities of others working under him. 2. The assistant librarian in charge of building up collections may require still other qualifications. Materials are fundamental to teaching and research. It is not enough for the acquisition librarian to know the book trade and the technical processes involved in securing materials. Knowledge of their content assumes major importance. T h e scholar or subject specialist or bibliographer is indicated for this position. His knowledge of bibliographical sources may well exceed his knowledge of technical processes and his administrative skill. Nevertheless, he must know the interrelationships of all parts of the library and be able to coordinate the work of the faculty and members of the library staff in a purposeful, well-integrated program of acquisition. This is essential because faculty members work intermittently at building up resources or select materials that are related to their own interests rather than to those that are important in a well-conceived long-range

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plan. Due to their teaching and research, they lack time for continuous application which successful selection requires. 3. T h e assistant librarian in charge of readers services should have still other abilities. His knowledge of the contents of materials must be extensive and he should also know how to assist students and scholars in securing the greatest educational benefit possible from their study and investigation. T h e roles of the bibliographer, the subject specialist, and the educator may, therefore, be the most important for him to play, whether as assistant director in charge of readers service, or as head of a divisional reading room, or of a major reference service. He cannot, however, neglect his role as administrator, since he is the library's representative in meeting its clientele and he must be able to provide it with a well-directed, smoothly functioning service. In doing this, his knowledge as a technician may also have to be brought into play, since much of the service he directs is dependent upon technical operations. The Role of the Promoter. Whether the research librar ian should be primarily a promoter or public relations expert is a matter about which there may be question. Certainly there is need for such abilities as a promoter possesses. Possibly it is a matter of definition or of personality. Is the promoter to be a planner who is to project a long-range building program; or is he to develop an extensive cooperative enterprise like the Midwest InterLibrary Center or the Farmington Plan; or is he to organize a campaign for securing endowment for library purposes; or is he to aid councils of learned and scientific [117]

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societies, educational foundations, federal agencies, and possibly international organizations, in carrying out some bibliographical or other important library programs? Opportunities for the exercise of such abilities occur daily in the life of the research librarian and the success of his library in many aspects of its work depends largely upon his wise utilization of them. What Is the Role of the Scholar-Research Worker? I have reserved for final consideration the question, "Should research librarians be scholars whose minds have been conditioned by long experience in research and should they be encouraged to participate in research?" This has long been a controversial question and doubtless will continue to be. What I have said earlier indicates that I believe the librarian can acquire a scholarly outlook and ability to engage in research and to understand its spirit as readily in librarianship as he can in other disciplines, and that in addition he has the opportunity through librarianship to become acquainted with techniques and administrative theories and principles that are essential to effective library administration but are lacking in scholarly training in other disciplines. Certainly the research librarian should be a person of scholarly attainment and should know how to formulate research problems and set himself or others to work on their solution. Otherwise, progress in meeting changes in library service will be slow indeed. He should likewise thoroughly understand the spirit of research, and know how to assist scholars in securing maximum benefits from the use of materials. Without such understanding, intelli-

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gent cooperation and maximum efficiency are impossible. T h e shortage of librarians having such ability and understanding has, more than anything else, caused university presidents and boards of trustees of scholarly libraries to turn to holders of academic positions for directors of libraries under their control. But that a scholar-director whose mind has been conditioned by long experience in research will be able to carry on a sustained program of research in the field in which he has worked previously, or that he should do so, is a different matter. In comparable European libraries, such programs of investigation and publication have frequently been carried on. Their organization and methods of procedure have made this feasible. But the administrative process in American libraries makes such constant and pressing demands upon the librarian's time and energy that he has but little left for such activities, unless he largely turns over the administration of the library to an associate librarian. In that case the library is apt to suffer because the librarian cannot represent it properly before the governing body because he lacks first-hand information and experience, and the associate librarian cannot represent it because he is usually not charged with this responsibility. In the first twenty-five years of my service as a practicing librarian, when I was studying library periodicals and reports for guidance in developing a research library program in a region in which large, well-functioning libraries were totally lacking, two of the major academic libraries of the nation were administered by professors who continued [119]

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their research and publication in their special fields. One was a professor of New Testament Greek; the other, a professor of history. They contributed little by way of guidance in library matters because they continued their previous activities and did not have sufficient time or library experience to prepare extensive reports on the administration of their libraries or to read stimulating papers before library conferences. During the past twenty-five years, the libraries which I have been called on to survey have most frequently been those where administrative ability has been lacking or an effort has been made by a scholar-librarian to play a double role with the result that usually follows the attempt to serve two masters. The Training of the Research Librarian. The lack of knowledge of research and of an understanding of its spirit which the scholar-librarian appointment attempts to supply has been and is being met in a number of ways. In France, through the École de Chartes, the prospective librarian pursues a curriculum of university studies with heavy emphasis on archives, manuscripts, diplomatics, palaeography, language, literature, history, and the theory of archival administration. In England, university studies have been considered basic for librarians holding university library posts. Training through apprenticeship in university libraries and passing the British Library Association examinations have likewise been required, and have generally been preferred until recently to library school training. In Germany, until the late 1930's, the prescribed [120]

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program of training for scholarly librarians called for university training leading to the doctorate and two years of training in the theory and practice of librarianship in the Prussian State Library, the Library of the University of Berlin, or a few other major state libraries. In the United States a number of library schools have developed faculties and curricula that have made possible training leading to the doctorate in librarianship. As a result, students who possess imagination, sound judgment, and the quality of dynamic leadership may master the theory and practice of librarianship and become proficient in carrying on research in that and related fields. They may likewise gain knowledge of subjects that closely support librarianship as well as of the ways in which scholars work and of the spirit which motivates them. Finally, through their study and investigation, such library school students may acquire a clearer understanding of the role of the library at various levels of education and research and may deepen their devotion to the library as an effective instrument for the achievement of high educational ends. Such mastery, such attainment, such knowledge, and such understanding, coupled with experience gained in service, should be sought by prospective research librarians if the libraries which they will direct are to make their full contribution to the civilization of tomorrow. In their discussion of the preceding papers, two of the discussants have sharply challenged this point of view of librarianship. They insist that the librarian, whose train[121]

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ing has been acquired in this way, may acquire skill in analyzing library problems and in applying established principles to library situations; but they deny him the possibility of acquiring a scholarly outlook and of joining in the quest of truth. In this they reflect the scholar's preoccupation with his subject field and his lack of understanding of librarianship in its broadest aspects. If they looked more closely at history and English, for example, they would find that scholars even in those mines rich in the ore of truth frequently spend much time in date checking, word counting, and the like, and that librarianship, while concerned with problems such as have been considered in this Symposium, in which librarian and scholar have participated on a common basis, is also concerned with other matters to the study of which the librarian may devote himself with the assurance that he too will discover richly rewarding ore. They would find that librarianship is concerned with classification, fundamental to all science; with bibliography, the key that unlocks accumulated resources for the scholar's use; with the history of writing and libraries, that parallels the long course of man's cultural development; with the accumulated records of civilization in all fields that are of supreme importance to librarian and scholar alike; and with the communication of ideas that have affected man's long upward climb and will continue to shape his future destiny. In all these areas, the librarian may find abundant opportunity not only to make easier the quest of truth for others, but to participate significantly in the quest himself. [122]

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DISCUSSION Introduction. Mr. David, at the time he invited us to participate in the Symposium, has given us an excellent statement of the problem. I understand that the term "research librarian," as used in this discussion, refers to the director of a research library, primarily a university or large public library, rather than a highly specialized library in a somewhat restricted field. CHARLES HARVEY B R O W N : *

All of us will agree with Mr. Wilson, I think, that the qualifications mentioned by Mr. David in his preliminary statement are not mutually exclusive. Fortunately, the possession of exceptional qualifications for one type of work does not necessarily imply that a librarian does not possess also notable qualifications in other fields. He may be an exceptional administrator with some actual successful experience in research. He certainly is an educator. I would like to add the parenthetical remark that the library profession today needs desperately highly qualified persons in each of the categories mentioned by Mr. David, whether such persons are heads of research libraries or not. Especially do we need inventive geniuses in technical processes, who also possess the ability to persuade their colleagues of the necessity of the adoption of new techniques. The flood of publications has become so enormous that few research • Librarian Emeritus, Iowa State College.

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libraries are able to handle their acquisitions expeditiously and economically. Duties. T h e duties of the head of a research library, as defined in this paper, are not confined exclusively to the organization and administration of a collection of books intended primarily for the use of research workers. T h e director of a university library also has the responsibility of the administration of a library intended to support undergraduate instruction. He has an obligation to many hundreds or thousands of students. His staff may vary from forty or fifty to many hundreds. T h e library must aid the university in the achievement of its goals. T h e recognized functions of a university as stated by a committee of the University of Pennsylvania are: (1) The creation of new knowledge by actual research; (2) Training in the methods of independent study; (3) The conservation and dissemination of knowledge by teaching; and (4) The application of this knowledge through direct service to the public. T h e director of a university library, therefore, should be in close contact with the members of the university staff engaged in these functions. Qualifications. T h e head of a large university library must have the ability and background to discuss intelligently with administrators, faculty members and students, and members of his own staff, questions relating to experimentation, instruction and extension. He must have some [124]

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of the qualities usually attributed to extroverts. "As one psychologist has put it, 'The i n t r o v e r t . . . avoids the trouble of meeting people, the extrovert goes out of his way to meet them. T h e introvert evades the obligations and demands of clubs and committees, the extrovert accepts them.' 1 , 1 T h e director, also, has the supervision of a large staff. Although many of the duties of supervision can be allocated to heads of library departments, yet the final responsibility must fall upon the chief librarian. "It is likely that supervisory work requires a considerable amount of extroversion and that the same is true of a satisfactory relationship with one's fellow employees." 2 According to psychologists the extrovert is inclined to welcome criticisms; the introvert resents them and is inclined to take them almost as personal affronts. T h e administrator must be able to accept and profit from criticisms—he certainly receives them, as all of us know from our own experiences. Research requires great attention to details, meticulous listing of data and great absorption in an experiment underway, often to the exclusion of other activities. Research workers are devoted to their explorations and regard their research activities of paramount importance. They are not especially interested in problems of supervision and administration. They are more likely to be introverts than extroverts. Research is a jealous master. It demands all. 1 L o u i s P. T h o r p e , Personality and Life, New York, 1941, p. 104. 2 H e n r y Beaumont, The Psychology of Personnel, New York, 1945, p. 23 [125]

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The headship of a large modern research library requires qualities which are not possessed by great research men. In view of his manifold duties and administrative obligations, the successful director of a university library will not have time for research to any considerable extent. If he possesses the qualifications of a successful administrator, he will not have the qualifications which will make him a great contributor to basic research; neither will he have the inclination for extensive research. Therefore, the director of a university library should be primarily an administrator with a wide knowledge of the fields of education and research. There are, however, a few exceptional persons who are so well balanced that they possess to a certain extent the qualities of both an extrovert and an introvert, although as one grows older one of these two traits seems to predominate. Historical Approach. Who were the librarians who were so successful during the past fifty years in organizing and administrating the great research libraries in this country? What qualities did they possess? Were they primarily administrators, research scholars, actively engaged in research, technicians, promoters or educators? One of the great research libraries in this country is the New York Public Library. This library was organized and administered by Dr. John Shaw Billings. He was a great administrator, an organizer and an educator. He also was a man of ideas. He was not actively engaged in research while he was head of the New York Public Library, but he had a keen appreciation of the research needs of scientists and

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scholars. In his earlier years he made many contributions to medical research. Although Dr. Billings may not have been greatly concerned with all the details of staff administration, he did select as assistants men such as Anderson and Lydenberg who not only supplemented his own special abilities but who later, as directors of the New York Public Library, carried on and developed Dr. Billings' concept of a great research library, as well as the educational activities of an admirable system of branch libraries. The characteristics of Dr. Billings, with minor changes in emphases, are found also among the former directors of most of the great research libraries in this country. Herbert Putnam of the Library of Congress, William Warner Bishop of the University of Michigan, C. W. Andrews of the John Crerar Library and many others could be mentioned. These men were active in the building of great research libraries during the past fifty years. They were interested in research; they attained reputations as scholars or scientists but primarily they were great administrators and organizers, rather than research workers. Educational Preparation. Any study of the desirable qualifications of a university librarian leads to the question as to the best educational preparation for those who hope to become university librarians. Administrative ability is not necessarily obtained by education; it may be innate. But a formal education can give some knowledge not only of techniques, but also of research methods and tools. There are a few exceptional individuals who have an inspired curiosity for knowledge and the ability to [127]

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search and find. The history of librarianship during the past fifty years reveals that many of our outstanding librarians made great contributions as builders and administrators of research libraries without the prerequisite of library school training and sometimes without graduate work in any subject department. Nevertheless, as a result of their inward urge for knowledge they became great librarians and scholars. However, for most of us, without the exceptional gifts which a few of our leaders possessed, formal graduate study may be desirable and even necessary. In my opinion, a knowledge of research methods and a preparation for work in a research library can best be obtained at the present time by graduate study in a subject field in which rigid research methods are required. 8 Personally, I believe that my two years of graduate study in the physical sciences were of far more value in my professional career as a librarian than were my two years at a library school, although the latter were certainly not value3 Cf. discussion of value of training in techniques of the physical and biological sciences as a preparation for research in the social sciences, in Barbara Wootton, Testament for Social Science: an Essay in the Application of Scientific Method to Human Problems, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., New York, W. W. Norton & Co.. 1950. Chapter 1, p. 1-5. "It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment. N o r are we troubled by doubts as to the validity of the results which scientific research has thus achieved in t h e understanding of, and the consequent power to manipulate, inanimate things. . . . It is no less obvious that this method, which has been so brilliantly successful in the natural sciences, is not normally applied to the field of o u r most disastrous failures. . . . T h i s contrast surely seems to point a simple moral—that we ought seriously to ask whether t h e tool that has worked such wonders in the one job could not b e used for the other" (quoted by permission of Messrs. Allen & Unwin),

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less. I have suggested to some students in library schools, who intended to apply for admission to the candidacy for the doctorate, that a major in a subject field with a minor in library science might be preferable to a major in the library school and a minor in some other department. This opinion is based upon a somewhat rigid definition of "research." What Is Research? An examination of fifteen different books on methodology of research discloses fifteen different definitions. Much of the disagreement in the papers presented at this Symposium comes from varying concepts of what is research and what is a research library. Much of the so-called research in certain disciplines in many universities would not be accepted as research by members of the same disciplines in other universities. Compilations, valuable as they may be, community surveys and even some statistical studies are not always accepted as research. On the other hand many specialists in applied fields would not accept the statement sometimes used in the physical and biological sciences that scientific research must rest upon verifiable experimentation. If scholars and scientists do not agree upon any definition of research, how can librarians be expected to agree upon research in librarianship? At least some of the various studies proposed as research studies in librarianship require considerable background in subject fields, such as political science, psychology, languages, history, mathematics and physiology. Why then should not students, eager [129]

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to prepare themselves for service in a research library, elect majors in the subject fields which will give training in somewhat rigid research methods? Furthermore, as has been stated at this Symposium, university libraries are tending to become systems of highly specialized departmental libraries located in various buildings. T h e head of such a departmental library should have a knowledge of the discipline concerned. He should be familiar with the research methods used by the clientele of his library. Actual experience in research is desirable. T h e library schools cannot be expected to train students in the methodology of research in the various disciplines, as, for example, the methodology of research in chemistry or mathematics. Such training must be given by the subject departments. Summary. From a study of the qualities which the head of a research library should possess and which the builders of our great research libraries did possess, it seems that administrative ability is the first essential qualification. An understanding of research methods in various fields, as well as educational techniques, is necessary. Some experience in research is desirable. Some of the traits of the promoter are of value, but above all the director of a university library must be an administrator and organizer. T h e other day I was looking at the new gossip column in PMLA and one young man in the column apparently objected to "papers on the papers." DONALD F . C A M E R O N : *

* Librarian, Professor of English, Rutgers University.

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He said he was quite sure that they inhibited discussion, and I had the feeling, as discussion was about to arise twenty minutes ago, that it would be better to let it continue than to have more "papers on the papers." One more reminiscence. A few years ago I was on a committee to recommend a new dean for a college of arts and sciences. Since we had some very efficient people on the committee, the first thing we did was to draw up a bill of particulars. T h e ideal dean was to be a scholar in a respectable field, a teacher of distinction, a sound thinker in educational theory, friendly to undergraduates, a firm and orderly administrator, a good public speaker, a man of cultivation and refinement, and, if possible, possessed of a charming and accomplished wife. T h e president thought well enough of this bill to send it to all his friends who were also college presidents and said, "Will you please send in nominations?" He got a telegram back from a near neighbor, saying " I will take the second choice, sight unseen." I was reminded of that as I heard Mr. Wilson's list of the accomplishments of the research librarian. Alas! he doesn't exist. It would be almost as though we got somebody with the zeal and scholarship of Charles David, the control of detail and ripe experience of Metcalf, and the soaring imagination and boldness of Ellsworth, all wrapped up in one man. But, unfortunately, I know where he would be. He would be vice-president in charge of production, research, and public relations in General Motors. W e have to take what we can get, and I am willing to [131]

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make the plea that the best thing we can get is a man who will be accepted by the faculty as a full-fledged member of the community of scholars. Something has got to be done about this measured melancholy of Mr. Metcalf and his fears about the rift which may grow between the librarians and the scholars as the demand by the library for a larger share of the university dollar becomes more pressing. Somebody in the library has got to be able to persuade the departments that now and again it may be necessary to get rid of a professor in order to maintain the book fund. I do not believe that an empire builder in the library who is divorced from the faculty, who is what they call a "pure administrator," can possibly persuade the faculty to come to such a pass. Where will we find these people? Unfortunately we know who the good ones are now, but we have got to find a method of recognizing them when they are 25 or 30, before they have had a chance to exercise their diplomacy, and learning, and management, and administration. My suggestion is that dual appointments be made at the rank of instructor and assistant professor, and that the qualifications in the subject field be most important, and these men come into the library, particularly in reference, acquisition, or bibliography. I propose that they go along through the ranks, through the grades, until they become, shall I say, too expensive for the library to maintain. Then if they wish to go completely into the departments of research and instruction, they go up the academic ladder. However, if we can afford to keep them, we keep them in the library [132]

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and push them up our ladder. That may sound like a wasteful process, but I do not think it is. I think that these young men can spend their early years of apprenticeship profitably divided between teaching and the library. When they become ready for a permanent appointment, if they disappear into the faculty, may we not hope that they in time will come to man the faculty committee on the library? Then we will have people on the committee who know something of our internal problems, who will be able to make their contribution even though we were unable to keep them permanently on the library staff. That is the only suggestion I can think of to make at the present time. The hour is late, and I would invite controversy, but like Professor Rice at one point of the discussion following his paper, I will meet the opponents outside.

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