Edwin E. Williams

The Harvard University Library: A Century of Changes in Administrative Structure

This article reviews efforts during the past century to coordinate Harvards federation of libraries, each of which is administratively responsible to the individual faculty, department of instruction, research institution, office, or other entity on which it depends for funds. A director, with particular responsibilities for coordination, was first appointed in 1910; functions of the position were reexamined in 1978 by a special presidents committee, which also reaffirmed the long-standing policy of coordinated decentralization. The university librarys personnel policy is one noteworthy achievement in coordination. Another, more recent achievement, is development of a computerized, distributable union catalog of holdings and consolidated record of orders, making resources more accessible and facilitating the coordination of collection building.

Library Co-operation and Specialization

I ACCUSE American university presidents (with individual exceptions that are all the more honorable because they are so few) of having been indifferent to the needless extravagance and the needless inadequacy of the libraries maintained by their universities. For at least forty years the presidents have been well aware of a situation which forces libraries to waste money and deprives scholars of needed research material; yet they have done little about it, and there seems to be no convincing evidence that they have tried to do much. Accusations have so often been fabricated to fit front-page headlines rather than the facts that accusers have earned themselves a poor reputation in academic circles, and a library employee who hurls charges at the distinguished presidents of leading universities, even if he can demonstrate that his generalizations are not groundless, to appear ridiculously presumptuous. But achievements in library co-operation and specialization have been well reported, and potentialities have been ably described. An author, when he has no new facts or suggestions to offer, and if he cannot hope to summarize the old ones as well as some of his predecessors have done, may convince himself that there is much to be said for name-calling. This, in the pages of the Library Quarterly, is not likely to damage anyone; yet it might do some good, if it should come to a presidents attention by annoying him enough to make him consider a few of the things that librarians have been saying for many years. The first point in the indictmentthat university presidents have known what the situation is for more than four decades-is not based on an assumption that presidents read this Quarterly or other journals of librarianship. They can plead ignorance of the facts only if they can demonstrate that they are unaware of what has been said at meetings of the Association of American Universities and printed in that organizations Journal of Proceedings and Addresses. At the fifteenth annual conference of the AAU, which met during November, 1913, a statement was presented on behalf of his school by William Dawson Johnston, the librarian of Columbia University. Because it is a good statement and because the presidents heard and printed it, relatively long excerpts will be offered as Exhibit A: