College and Research Libraries DAVID KASER A Century of Academic Librarianship, As Reflected in Its Literature AcADEMIC LIBRARIANSHIP can view its past from several different vantage points. It can comb the minutes of its corporate actions; it can piece together the lives of its great practitioners; it can reconstruct such archaeological remains as its older buildings, equipment, forms, and other artifacts. These and other kinds of study will all contribute usefully to a better perspective against which the profession can judge the de- cisions it faces, can separate the tran- sient occurrences of the moment from the more chronic and permanent condi- tions deserving higher priority attention, and can improve the wisdom of its fu- ture actions through an understanding of what has been tried before. This essay will attempt to review the last century of academic librarianship as it is reflected in its literature. It will note not only what was written, but it will also try to determine why it was written, as well as to speculate upon the reasons for its being written when it was written. It will view the literature neither comprehensively nor statistical- ly, although both of those approaches deserve also to be taken, but rather based upon a very limited selection of its highest peaks and most notable land- marks. Any such selection must be high- ly subjective, and although many of the works discussed herein will doubtless en- joy the concurrence of most American 110 I library historians, others will clearly be seen as personal. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the selection will be ade- quate to permit the identification of some trends and influences and the pos- iting of some useful generalizations about the development of the profes- sion of academic librarianship. THE BEGINNINGS Any surveyor of the literature of li- brarianship during the two decades fol- lowing 1876 must be struck by how very little was written in the period which concerned specifically academic librades. That heavy compendium produced in 1876 by the U.S. Bureau of Education, entitled Public Libraries in the United States, contained only two essays about college and university libraries per se. Yet many, perhaps most, of the other thirty-six pieces, while general in sub- ject, were written by academic librari- ans, making it as clear to the reader that these founders of the profession had their minds so affixed to the commonal- ities of concern among all libraries that they were unable yet to ponder the uniquenesses of the several kinds of libraries. The periodical literature of the peri- od supports this perception. Although the October 1877 issue of Library Jour- nal was' a "college number," the peri- odical press outside of that single issue f • A Century of Academic Librarianship I Ill carried fewer than a half-dozen articles on college and university libraries be- fore the mid-1880s . A growing sense of identity among academic librarians marked the last decade of the nine- teenth century, however. Not only did its literature grow heavier during that period, but there were other manifesta- tions as well. A College Library Section of ALA was formed in 1890, and in 1896 Maude Wheeler Carman presented a thesis to the Armour Institute of Technology entitled "The College Li- brary; How It Differs from a Public Library." Academic librarianship' s lack of self- awareness during the first qu~rter of the period under review here is demonstrat- ed nowhere more than in the bibliogra- phy of the subject. The first attempt publicly to "bibliographize" academic li- brarianship was apparently not made until the turn of the century, when in 1899 Hugh Williams of the Library of Congress produced his fifty-five-page document entitled College Libraries in the United States; Contributions toward · a Bibliography. Published as number 19 in the "Bibliographic Bulletin" series of the New York State Library, this publication established that institution as the geographical center of academic library bibliography for some three and a half decades thereafter. Bibliographical coverage of the litera- ture for the period 1899 to 1926 be- came available in the latter year when the Bibliography of American College Library Administration was issued also by the New York State Library as its "Bibliographic Bulletin" number 77. This new publication was greatly larger than its predecessor and contained some 600 titles. Practically no books had been written during the period, however, and fully . one-fourth of the entries were unidimensional descriptions of collec- tions, processes, or circumstances within individual libraries. There were no re- search investigations or empirical analy- ses to be reported; that kind of scholar- ly writing had not yet come into the field. Nor had any journals yet come into being which were addressed primarily to college and university libraries. That was still almost fifteen years ahead. Most of the articles published before 1925 had appeared, predictably perhaps, in Library I ournal. The ALA Bulletin had published several, as had also Pub- lic Libraries, which later became Li- braries. School and Society and other nonlibrary journals, were also represent- ed by a number of items. Many of the works cited were not from periodicals at all but from annual reports and handbooks of local libraries; proceed- ings of workshops and dedicatory cere- monies; addresses; and other similar documents. The ~ubject matter of the items listed in this quarter-century bibliography ranged pretty evenly over the full spec- trum of the academic library concerns of that or any other period. Aspects of finance and budgeting were well repre- sented, as were articles on the several li- brary processes, such as acquisition, cir- culation, cataloging, and reference. Many articles discussed personnel, in- cluding concerns for training, qualifica- tions, rank, vacations, salaries, and the like. There were some papers on build- ings and equipment (largely descrip- tive ) , the role of library faculty com- mittees, and such public relations activi- ties as mounting ~{{hibits, publishing, and the preparation of reports. Surpris- ingly heavy was the literature dealing with instruction in use of the college li- brary, extending to fully thirty-eight entries, or almost 7 percent of the total. Collection development, book selection, and public services, on the other hand, were relatively lightly treated. ·The names of the most prolific au- thor~ during this period were predicta- bly different from those of the pre- vious. Although an occasional piece still 112 I College & Research Libraries • March 1976 turned up by such original nineteenth- century worthies as Charles Ammi Cut- ter and Melvil Dewey, these years re- flected the work of a whole new army · of library giants. William Warner Bish- op of the University of Michigan was everywhere, publishing well over 100 books, articles, and reviews in this quar- ter-century alone. Here also was the ubiquitous Louis Round Wilson. Ober- lin's Azariah S. Root wrote prolifically, as did Princeton's E. C. Richardson, Cornell's Willard Austen, F. K. W. Drury then of Brown, and James Inger- soll Wyer of the New York State Li- brary. Women, notably silent before the turn of the century, began to ·make their presence known in print, and writ- ings appeared over the names of Colum- bia's Isadore Gilbert Mudge and Mar- garet Hutchins and Minnie Earl Sears, then of the New York Public Library. By the end of the period still another generation of great librarians was be- ginning to raise its voice also, and there were pieces by Keyes D. Metcalf, Charles B. Shaw, and Frank K. Walters. By the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the literature of aca- demic librarianship had become very substantial, and even the simple task of listing it regularly had become a chore of some magnitude. Dorothy Plum con- tinued the work, however, and all-told issued four supplements to the Albany bibliographies covering the next seven years. The first three supplements ap- peared one each in the three Year books ( 1929, 1930, and 1931) of ALA's Col- lege and Reference Section, and the fourth, for 1931-1933, was published in the latter year by the Vassar College Li- brary. The separate listing of the liter- ature of academic libraries largely end- ed there, however. H. G. T. Cannon's comprehensive Bibliography of Library Economy 1876-1920, had appeared in 1927, and this was brought up to 1934 when ALA's Junior Members Round Table produced Library Literature for the next decade. The latter monument, of " course, continues today under the auspices of the H. W. Wilson Company, eliminating the need for special cover- age in the academic field. Merging aca- demic library listings into those of other library literature, however, rendered them thereafter difficult, if possible at all, to review at a glance, diminished the profile of the leading writers in the field, and ended an important era in academic librarianship. THE DEVELOPMENT OF TEXTBOOKS During the first third of the century under discussion here, there was no sin- gle text to which a reader could go to gain an overall impression of the scope and work of academic librarianship. When the first effort was made to repair this deficiency, moreover, it was a mod- est effort indeed, containing only eigh- teen pages. Written by James Ingersoll Wyer, The College and University Li- brary comprised number 4 in ALA's thirty-two-part '~Manual of Library Economy." Attempting to describe best contemporary practice, this little hand- book contained brief essays on the functions of college and univer~ity li- braries, buildings, governance, the li- brarian and other staff, finances, depart- mental libraries, and the administration of library operations. This slender pamphlet remained the sole textbook in the field for fully twenty-five years, and · reappeared in revjsion in 1921 and 1928. A very difficult problem standing in the way of proper textbook develop- ment not only for college and university librarians but for the rest of librarian- ship as well in those early days was not to determine just what constituted "best practice," but indeed "practice" at all. Most discussions of practice in the . lit- erature had been either speculative or had described methods which were as yet untried; others, as was mentioned earlier, concerned procedures within a single library. Librarians could augment 1 I --41 1 'ft l A Century of Academic Librarianship I 113 this kind of information only by visit- ing other libraries or talking with other librarians. It was at best a slow and te- dious business. By the time of World War I, how- ever, the profession had concluded that such ignorance about itself was no long- er tolerable. In 1919 ALA President William Warner Bishop appointed a "Committee of Five" to conduct a sur- vey of the entire field of library service. With a grant from the Carnegie Cor- poration of New York, this group sent questionnaires to more than 3,000 li- braries across the nation in an attempt to determine just what and how things were being done in American libraries. Some 261 replies were received from academic libraries, and these, together with responses from other libraries, were used in the preparation of ALA's four-volume Survey of Libraries in the United States which appeared in 1926. The survey by today's standards was amateurish and unsophisticated in both conceptualization and analysis. The re- port contained some simple statistics and much description of actual practice in the college and, university libraries of the land. Under "Administration" there were data on faculty library commit- tees; the number, size, and administra- tion of departmental and seminar col- lections; and the organizational struc- ture of the library. There were financial data on such matters as the percentage of the budget spent for materials, per- student expenditure for books and staff, ratio of library to institutional expendi- ture, and the apportionment of funds. Information was reported on personnel practices, including appointments and promotions, education of librarians, salaries, working hours, and staff wel- fare. And data were given on hours of opening, library fees, · overdue fines, ac- cess to stacks, nonbook materials, and other public service matters. The tech- nical services were represented by infor- mation on. cataloging, classification, ac- cou~ting, and binding practices. For the first time in its history, aca- demic librarianship was possessed of a body of hard data about itself. Some of it was inaccurate, some was incom- plete, some was unanalyzed, some was not what was truly needed. Nonetheless, the potential utility of such data was obvious. Improved in quality and quan- tity, it was for the first time recognized that such data could lead not only to some valid generalizations as to "best practice," but also to the development of a much more fruitful and realistic "standard practice." Refinement of this process of statisti- cal introspection was not long in com- ing. George A. Works, a nonlibrarian who was chairman of the Division of Education at Cornell University and was later to become dean of the Graduate Library School at the University of Chi- cago, was retained by the Association of American Universities, again under a Carnegie Corporation grant, to begin the task. His College and University Li- brary Problems, which was issued by ALA in 1927, reported statistical analy- ses of the libraries in eighteen institu- tions of higher education, all of which were universities, save for Oberlin and Vassar. The study did not deal at all with internal operational problems, which had been the preoccupation of most literature at that time, but concen- trated rather upon identifying relation- ships between such things as enrollment and collection size, teaching salaries and library expenditures, costs of books and periodicals, salaries of instructors and librarians, and like matters. The profession's data about itself were further enlarged in 1932 with the publication of somewhat similar statis- tics and descriptions of more than 200 four-year liberal arts institutions, based upon questionnaires and visits by Wil- liam M. Randall of the Graduate Li- brary School faculty at the University of Chicago. Entitled The College Li- 114 I College & Research Libraries • March 1976 brary, this volume was "primarily a study of conditions. It [was] not in any sense a textbook in college library ad- ministration" ( p.3). This work was also funded by the Carnegie Corporation and was supervised by its very influen- tial Advisory Group on College Li- braries, comprising librarians William Warner Bishop as chairman, Andrew Keogh, Carl Milam, Louis Round Wil- son, and a numb~ of college deans and presidents. Among other facts, the study found the ratio of library to institu- tional expenditure to stand at 9.3 per- cent, the seating capacity of college li- brary buildings at 25 percent, and the ratio of women to men in the post of head librarians at three to one. With good reliable data in hand de- scribing practice in academic librarian- ship, the profession found itself in need of a summary of contemporary thought on the matter. The task of pre- paring such a summary fell upon Blanche P. McCrum, librarian of Wash- ington and Lee University. Her book, which was somewhat mistitled Estimate of Standards for a College Library, ap- peared in 1933, having grown out of a document in which she attempted "to summarize for the president a~d the board of trustees of a college not only the needs of their library, but also the principles behind those needs" ( p.ix). McCrum's volume constituted a thor- ough review of contemporary thought and debate regarding libraries and was drawn not only from the published lit- erature but also extensively from li- brary minutes, annual reports, staff man- uals, handbooks, and ephemera. Armed now with hard data in the volumes by Works and Randall, a sum- mary of theoretical considerations by McCrum, and a growing corpus of rele- vant papers in the library press, academ- ic librarianship was by the mid-thirties for the first time in a position to pro- duce a true textbook. The task was as- sumed, naturally enough, by William M. Randall, who allied himself with F. L. D. Goodrich, librarian of the City College of New York, to produce in 1936 the first edition of their Principles of College Library Administration. Whereas the .literature to date had been largely and necessarily descriptive, this textbook was avowedly prescriptive, in- tending, according to its Preface, "to set forth certain principles which may be applied in the administration of the liberal arts college library" (p.v). The work, which was published by ALA, was widely used and required a second edi- tion in 1941. Fully sixty years after the establishment of its professional asso- ciation, librarianship at last was pos- sessed of a textbook which it could use in the preparation of aspiring academic librarians. The balance of the century was one of refining, improving, and broadening textbook coverage of the field. For gen- eral college work the quality of avail- able texts was enhanced greatly in 1944 with the appearance of Administration of the College Library by Guy R. Lyle, who was at that time librarian of the University of North Carolina Woman's College. Finding no "suitable text- books" in the field, Lyle set about to produce a comprehensive work, stressing the "broad view" but emphasizing the "practical" aspects of the work. Its ac- ceptance was immediate, and it prompt- ly superseded its predecessor by Randall and Goodrich as the standard handbook in the field, a recognition which it still enjoys. The work proceeded with little change through a second edition in 1949, a much-revised third edition in 1961, and a fourth revised edition in 1974. Text books on specialties within aca- demic librarianship began shortly there- after to appear. An exposition of prac- tice in larger, more complex institutions appeared in 1945 under the title The University Library by Louis Round Wil- son of the University of North Caro- f l . A Century of Academic Librarianship I 115 lina and Maurice F. Tauber of Colum- bia. This book, with its second edition in 1956, served as the standard text on the subject of university library admin- istration until 1971 when a volume with that title appeared written by Yale's Rutherford D. Rogers and Stanford's David C. Weber. Likewise, smaller academic libraries gained their own texts during the peri- od. A fairly thorough volume on The Junior College Library by Ermine Stone had appeared as early as 1932, and Helen R. Wheeler's Community College Library, a Plan for Action served a use- ful purpose following its appearance in 1965. The standard textbook in the field, however, had to await the end of the century when Fritz Veit's Communi- .ty College Library was produced by Greenwood Press in 1975. Meanwhile, a helpful handbook entitled The Small College Library by Sister Helen Shee- han, S.N.D., librarian of Trinity Col- lege in the District of Columbia, was issued in 1963, and required a second edition in 1968. THE EvoLUTION OF STANDARDS The last half-century of academic li- brarianship has been marked by a dogged search for standards which has been fully as frenetic, as pervasive, and frequently as frustrating and seemingly chimerical as the quest for the Holy Grail. "Standards must exist somewhere, if we are but wise enough and per- sistent enough to find them," the :fifty- year actions of the profession seem to have implied. Yet a review of those ac- tions also purveys somehow a discom- forting sense of unreality, as though academic librarians were, perhaps sub- consciously, interested in standards less for purposes of library evaluation than as a manifestation of societal concur- rence that what they do is important. Different from the case of the Grail, the pursuit of ·academic library stan- dards has been at least partially and tentatively successful. A stated purpose behind the ALA Survey of Libraries 'in 1926, the Works study in 1927, and the Randall survey in 1932 was to prepare the way for aca- demic library standards. Standards were in each case described to the Carnegie Corporation as a key social benefit that could be expected from the expenditure of its grant money. Standards, it was pointed out, could only be developed out of an understanding of the possi~ ble. Carl H. Milam accordingly distilled information from the first two of these three studies and from twenty-six other citations of lesser consequence in the preparation of his "Suggestions for Minimum College Library Standards," which appeared in the second College and Reference Section Year book in 1930. The penultimate section of Ran- dall's study two years later noted how the results of his survey could be con- verted into standards, and he concluded with an actual draft of proposed stan- dards. This draft was offprinted by the sponsoring Advisory Group on College Libraries of the Carnegie Corporation in 1932 and, without benefit of wider approbation, long served as moral sua~ sion for college library development. The next major spur to action on this knotty problem of college library stan- dards was an effort by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools to rationalize its efforts at insti- tutional evaluation for purposes of ac- creditation. Douglas Waples of the Uni- versity of Chicago Graduate Library School was retained to study problems of college library evaluation, and the results of his work were published in 1936 with the title The Evaluation of Higher Institutions. IV. The Library. This early effort to determine quantita- tive standards based upon a description of the status quo recommended that li- braries be adjudged on the numbers of books and current journals they held 116 I College & Research Libraries • March 1976 that were listed in standard bibliogra- College and University Library Accredi- phies, their expenditure for books and tation Standards, 1957 all of the re- journals, the ratio of salary expendi- quirements for libraries in higher edu- , tures to enrollment, and the numbers of cation then being observed by the pro- loans to students and faculty. Waples fessional and regional accrediting asso- also noted as unresolved problems such ciations. issues as library and institutional excel- In the same year the ACRL Board of lence, relationships between reading and Directors authorized and appointed a scholarship, and between reading and Committee on Standards chaired by extracurricular activities. Felix E. Hirsch of Trenton State Col- The appearance of Waples' study, lege. This committee labored for two carrying with it the threat of possible years and produced in 1959 the first real nonaccredirtation by the North Central set of "Standards for College Libraries" Association, raised a predictable flurry to enjoy the consensual support of the of surrejoinders, notably in the trilogy profession. This highly influential docu- presented at ALA's midwinter meeting ment was instrumental for some fifteen the following year. Published in 1938 years thereafter in gaining improve- in a volume entitled College and Uni- ment in college library resources and versity Library Service, edited by A. F. services not only in America but in the Kuhlman of the Joint University Li- est of the world as well. braries, these papers were written by The 1959 standard for which it was Jackson E. Towne of Michigan State most difficult to gain agreement outside University, G. Flint Purdy of Wayne the profession was the statement which (State) University, and John Dale Rus- called for a book collection of 50,000 sell of the University of Chicago. The volumes, augmented by 10,000 addition- Towne and Purdy papers especially ex- al volumes for each 200 students above pressed the profession's unease that the 600. "Why," college presidents and oth- NCA's standards would evaluate too ers often asked, "Why 50,000?', And few of the requisite activities of the , ~"why should colleges with different pur- college library, that it was limiting / 1 oses all have the same size library?" An them too directly to the curricular of- epochal effort to improve the plausibili- ferings of the college, and that the sub- ty of a quantitative standard for collec- jective evaluation of quality was unduly tion size was made in 1965 by Verner W. subordinated to the objective evaluation Clapp and Robert T. Jordan of the of quantity. Council on Library Resources in a The problem of college library stan- piece unassumingly entitled "Quantita- dards was hardly solved, but the amount tive Criteria for Adequacy of Academic of professional literature devoted to the Library Collections." In it they pro- subject subsided considerably during posed adopting a basic collection size World War II and the immediate post- which would then be supplemented in war period. Much of the thinking and fixed increments for each faculty mem- work on standards for a number of her, student, and field of concentration years was done in the regional accredit- in an institution's curriculum. The ing associations, generating an under- Clapp/Jordan concept stood up well standable ·apprehension among librari- / under subsequent scrutiny and debate ans that they had somehow lost the ini~ 1 and, with certain limited transmogrifi- tiative in their development. Under the.' cations, was adopted for evaluation editorial oversight of Eli M. Oboler, purposes by several state systems of then of Idaho· State College, the ACRL higher education. A revision of the brought together in a volume entitled "Standards for College Libraries," in- [ A Century of Academic Librarianship I 117 corporating the Clapp I Jordan concept and other more recent thinking and ex- perience in academic librarianship, was developed in 1975 by an ACRL Com- mittee chaired by Johnnie E. Givens of Austin Peay State University. By the end of the century this document ap- peared to have received a level of pro- fessional approbation similar to that en- joyed by its predecessor. Junior college libraries experienced somewhat less difficulty developing stan- dards for themselves than had their four-year college brethren. Although Stone had drafted some trial standards in her Junior College Library in 1932, it was not until an ACRL committee, chaired by Felix E. Hirsch, produced a · set of "Standards for Junior College Li- braries" in 1960 that the profession had a document which it could adopt. These standards served well until they were superseded in 1972 by a set of "Guide- lines for Two-Year College Learning Resources Programs." The "Guidelines" were essentially qualitative, and a quan- titative supplement to them was au- thorized by ACRL in 1975. University librarians, on the other hand, found progress on standards more difficult to accomplish. Following years of feckless discussion of the matter, largely within the Association of Research Libraries, the ARL and ACRL joined' in 1968 in a somewhat promising effolt to devise university library standards. The major research in this direction was made by Robert B. Downs of the University of Illinois in 1969 in his University Library Statistics, which was based upon the premise that the aggregate experience of fifty university libraries noted for their excellence in resources and service ought to provide a foundation upon which standards can be built. As has been seen elsewhere in this review, in other words, it shoul