Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1912 [PAGE 641]

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1912]

PROCEEDINGS OE THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES.

597

The University should look forward to the accumulation of a collection of at least a million of books as rapidly as is at all possible and at all consistent with due regard for other interests. Roughly speaking, it will take about a $1,000,000.00 to house a million books; and, either in the form of a new library building, which" might be put up in four $250,000.00 sections, or in the form of an addition to and an enlargement of the present library building, at a somewhat similar expense, we must make provision for such a collection. Speaking from an experience of eight years as your executive officer, I think I may say that I have had more people whom I have approached to consider positions at the University of Illinois turn down^the proposition because of the lack of library facilities than for any other one reason; even more than because of the inadequate salaries which we offer for many of our positions as compared with the salaries which other institutions offer for similar positions. I have asked the University librarian, in consultation with the Senate committee on the library, to prepare a statement showing the maximum sum of money which year in and year out can wisely be devoted by the University of Illinois to the purchase of books and the cataloging of the same. In view of this fundamental need of all departments alike, I think the trustees should accept this figure, after it has been properly checked up and tested, as the sum which the University ought to ask for in the form of a specific appropriation for the purchase of books in the permanent budget of the University, until our collection numbers at least one million volumes. No one who hasn't actually attempted to answer the numerous questions arising in every library and seminary room, as to what is known about this, that, or the other subject, can have any conception of how inadequate our facilities are. To give a slight instance of the imperative need of this material on the one hand and the absolute inability of the University to provide it on the other, I may say that the Governor of the State telegraphed to me one day saying that a bill had been passed by the Legislature and submitted to.him for approval or for veto, providing that the milk which was shipped into cities of a certain size in this State should be limited to that which was obtained from tuberculin tested cows. He desired to know first what similar laws existed in this and other states and this aiki other countries. He desired to know further what the experience had been where similar attempts had been made. I found on inquiry that our University Library could not answer any one of these questions involved in these simple and yet fundamental inquiries. There was no collection of the laws relating to the regulation of the milk industry either in this country or abroad. There was no way of finding out where this kind of experiment had been tried in this country or abroad, or how it had worked out. One of the fundamental distinctions between our American universities as a whole and European universities, is to be found in this matter of library facilities, and I believe that one of the reasons why American scholarship has limped along at such a distance behind European scholarship is to be found in the lack of such inspiration and the lack of such assistance as are afforded by great collections of books, which contain in themselves the recorded experience of the human race. The foregoing statement was received for record. OFFICE ROOM FOR Y. W. C. A. (13) A request from the Young Women's Christian Association that the association be assigned the use of the west room on the. second floor of the south wing of the present Woman's building, for use as an office, until the new building which the association is proposing to erect at the corner of Wright and John streets be completed.