College and Research Libraries


To the Editor: 
Mea culpa, m ea maxima culpa! I am un-

der the painful necessity of correcting an 
erroneous date which I gave in an earlier 
letter to the editor. (CRL, 31 (March 
1970), page 118.) In that letter, comment-
ing on an article, "Three Early Academic 
Library Surveys," by Norman D. Stevens 
in the November 1969 issue of CRL, I sug-
gested that there was at least one "survey 
of an American college library by an out-
side expert" earlier than the last two of the 
three of 1915, 1937, and 1938 which Mr. 
Stevens described. I was guilty of relying 
upon circumstantial evidence. 

I now have a letter from Neil A. Rad-
ford, who is gathering data for a doctoral 
dissertation at the Graduate Library School 
on the role of the Carnegie Corporation in 
the development of American college li-
braries. In the course of his labors, Mr. 

64/ 

Letters 

Radford has secured from the librarian of 
Washington College, Chestertown, Mary-
land, a Xerox copy of the survey report of 
the College Library, written by William M. 
Randall and me, and which I suggested 
must have been done in 1934 or 1935. The 
report is dated December 1939. I apologize 
to any readers of CRL who may have been 
misled by my earlier letter. 

Followers of this topic will no doubt be 
interested to know that Mr. Radford has al-
so discovered several college library surveys 
which, in fact, were done earlier than 1938: 
one in 1926; and others in 1931, 1932, 
1934, 1936, and 1937; the last five by Ran-
dall. I hope that when Mr. Radford has 
completed his investigations, he will give 
us an article reporting his full findings. 

]. Periam Danton, 
Professor of LibraTianship, 
University of California, Berkeley