College and Research Libraries


T h e Need for Research 
in the Library Field 

By R I C H A R D H. LOGSDON 

WHEN I was first asked to open the afternoon session of this meeting 
with a brief statement on the need for 
research in the library field, I was told 
that the assignment would be an easy 
one; in fact, that the paper was already 
written. All that was needed was to find 
the address delivered as the Founder's 
Day exercises of the School of Library 
Service at Western Reserve University 
on J u n e 10, 1930. Somehow neither my 
memory nor our filing system recorded 
this good advice. Two hours ago, at the 
close of the morning session, I was re-
minded again of this possibility. Over 
the noon hour I found the address and 
have here volume one, number one, of 
the Library Quarterly, the journal which 
has contributed so much to our literature 
through the thirty years of its existence. 
T h e opening article: " T h e Place of Re-
search in Library Service"; the author: 
my predecessor, Dr. C. C. Williamson. 
Although it was too late to change my 
notes, I should like to open my remarks 
by reading a paragraph from page three 
of this article. 

" I f the library is to rise to its op-
portunity as a social institution and 
educational force it must, it seems to 
me, begin very soon to attack its prob-
lems by a thoroughgoing application 
of the spirit and methods of research 
that are being found so effective in 
every other field. In the natural sci-
ences as well as in the humanistic and 
social sciences, in the applied sciences, 
in education, in business and industry, 
in social service—everywhere except 
in the library field—extensive pro-
grams of research are being carried 

Dr. Logsdon is Director of Libraries, Co-
lumbia University. This paper was presented 
at the forth-sixth annual Conference of 
Eastern College Librarians at Columbia Uni-
versity, November 26, 1960. 

out, highly organized and well fi-
nanced." 
I did recall also having made some 

observations some years ago on the same 
topic at a meeting of the American Li-
brary Association. My assignment then 
was to summarize six papers presented by 
a panel dealing with the subject of tech-
nical services divisions in libraries. In 
that summary I said in effect, " I f we 
are to make progress in solving the prob-
lems of mounting technical services costs 
and arrearages which are plaguing so 
many libraries, we must have continued 
reexamination of our present procedures 
and research and experimentation in 
new methods of accomplishing our ob-
jectives. We are doing this now in some 
of our libraries, but certain types of re-
search and experimentation are difficult 
of accomplishment by staff members with 
regular assignments without seriously in-
terfering with necessary day-to-day opera-
tions. Perhaps we should take a lesson 
from industry where a process may be 
tested in a pilot plant before attempted 
on a production basis. Better still, if li-
braries could band together in setting 
up such a technical services laboratory, if 
we had as little as fifty thousand dollars 
per year (then about 2 per cent of our 
annual technical services operating costs) 
we might come out at the end of a five-
year period with new ideas and proce-

S E P T E M B E R 1 9 6 1 363 



dures capable of saving several times that 
amount." 

T h i s was written twelve years ago. 
T h e only changes I would make here 
today would be to extend the idea from 
technical services to cover all aspects of 
librarianship; to double the period to 
ten years (or better still, indefinitely); 
and increase the budget by at least ten-
fold. I would suggest these changes be-
cause the environment in which we work 
today is even more complex than that of 
1948. W e see evidences of this in almost 
every issue of every journal dealing with 
the subject. W e are not just imagining 
the hundred thousand important jour-
nals and the thousands of new mono-
graphs, documents, and reports appear-
ing every year. On the contrary, we must 
face day in and day out decisions to 
order or not to order from among these 
many thousands of items. At Columbia 
we have been adding seven hundred to 
a thousand new journals every year for 
at least the last dozen years. Few titles 
can be dropped. 

Our faculties are demanding more 
breadth and depth of collecting; not 
many years ago our Slavic acquisitions 
were less than 1 per cent of the total. 
Today, approximately one book in every 
fifteen is related to this new area of con-
cern, but we must be concerned with 
China, too, and India and Pakistan and 
the whole Middle Eastern area and East 
Central Europe and now Africa, while 
at the same time not lessening our repre-
sentation of Western European and, of 
course, American materials. T h i s is 
bringing us new problems in range and 
diversity of languages, interpolation of 
bibliographical information into our cat-
alogs, and is even raising havoc with 
some of our classification systems. We are 
finding that this specialization in the 
university is carrying over into the col-
lege campus. Young faculty members 
coming out of our universities want to 
be able to keep up in their highly speci-
alized fields of research. T h e y may even 

carry with them opportunities for gov-
ernment contract work, extending local 
college campus needs well beyond the 
normal range of the curriculum. 

B u t sheer numbers of items alone is 
not the problem. If they were like so 
many reams of typing paper, they would 
easily be warehoused and distributed on 
an expendable basis as such uniform 
stock items are. But in our case each 
item has its own distinct bibliographical 
character, as the Cresap, McCormick, and 
Paget study of the New York Public Li-
brary discovered. Research library ac-
tivities do not lend themselves well to 
mass-production techniques. 

W e have good reason to be proud of 
the record libraries have made in de-
veloping good catalogs, but even our 
best catalogs and indexes seem to be 
falling far short of the needs of today's 
researchers. With in the week, the Coun-
cil of Library Resources release on the 
Swanson report on searching natural 
language texts by computer closed on 
the note that . . even though machines 
may never enjoy more than partial suc-
cess in library indexing, a small suspi-
cion might justifiably be entertained that 
people are even less promising."1 And 
while we are on the subject of people, 
let us not forget that we face extremely 
difficult years ahead in finding people 
to do the j o b expected of us. W e will 
need many more librarians with even 
higher skills than today's jobs require. 
Our library schools have been turning 
out something close to seventeen hun-
dred graduates a year. T h e r e seem to 
be at least seven jobs for every graduate 
according to a recent government release. 
W e have heard for many years the short-
age figure of twelve thousand profes-
sionally trained librarians. T h i s would 
take all of the graduates of all of the 
schools for the next seven years, even if 
no librarian presently employed left his 
job. Likewise projections of enrollment 

l "Don R. Swanson, "Searching Natural Language 
T e x t by Computer" Science, C X X X I I ( 1 9 6 0 ) , 1104. 

364 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S 



for our colleges and universities suggest 
that if we maintain our present ratio of 
professional librarians to students reg-
istered in course, higher education alone 
could absorb essentially all of the new 
graduates. If you talk to school librari-
ans, they will give you something of the 
same picture for their field, and we all 
know that the public libraries and spe-
cial libraries are effective competitors 
with colleges and universities in the em-
ployment of new graduates. We must be 
sure as never before that we are using 
our manpower to the best advantage. 

There are still other characteristics of 
the environment in which we work which 
call for renewed emphasis on research 
and development, but perhaps the great-
est need and the greatest opportunity is 
really to save us from ourselves. Librar-
ians are by nature conservative in their 
outlook, and no matter what we say, our 
institutions tend to hold rather sharply 

to traditional solutions. Perhaps some 
of these traditional solutions will still 
prove best in the long run, but they 
will survive finally only if put to the 
full test against all competition. 

We have created a kind of monster, 
really, through no fault of ours, save the 
circumstances. If this monster continues 
to evolve along its present lines, I fear 
that it will become a kind of twentieth-
century dinosaur, probably not unlike 
the brontosaurus. He was a gentle an-
imal, I am told; a leafeater when much 
of North America was tropical, a perfect 
place for him, and he grew big and fat 
and finally weighed forty tons; and then 
he began to have trouble, first with the 
toothy meat-eaters, but it was finally the 
climate that licked him. It changed, and 
he was too set in his ways to change with 
it. Unfortunately, he had no Council on 
Library Resources to bring him around, 
and fast! 

LC Studies Serial Publications 

Scientific and technical serial publications of the world will be the subject of a 
study to be conducted by the Science and Technology Division of the Library of 
Congress through support from the National Science Foundation. T h e study has 
two objectives: a compilation of a bibliography of sources on scientific and technical 
serials and, based on a study of these sources, a count of the current serial titles of 
the world by country and by subject. T h e bibliography and the census will serve the 
purpose of bringing under bibliographical control a body of literature essential to 
librarians in planning acquisitional and informational services. 

At the present time, the World List of Scientific Periodicals, published in 1952, 
is the basis for estimates of the number of scientific serials currently being published 
throughout the world. T h e distinction between the present study and such publica-
as the List and the 1956-57 Unesco study, Statistics of Newspapers and Other Peri-
odicals, is that the present study will serve as a source both for information concern-
ing the most recently published bibliographies of scientific serials and for a verifi-
able statistical count based on these sources. 

T h i s 1-year study will be under the direction of Charles M. Gottschalk, Head of 
the Reference Section in the Science and Technology Division. Preliminary results 
are expected to be published in 6 months.—LC Information Bulletin, X X (July 24, 
1961) 436. 

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