Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1912 [PAGE 640]

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596

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

[June 7

the part of the student body of the university. So important is this influence that it has been said that a great library will under favorable conditions become a great university. Books are not dead. They are alive to the man who comes in contact with them and knows how to use them. They are the sources of inspiration and power, and not merely of knowledge. It is safe to say that the University of Illinois Library is most inadequate for the purposes which a university library ought to serve. No man in our faculty can today carry on a scientific investigation in any line without running up very soon against an absolutely inpenetrable stone wall, because he has not access to the entire experience of the race and he is therefore groping blindly in whatever he is attempting to do; duplicating work which other men have done; attempting to do things which other men have demonstrated to be impossible; experimenting without the advantage of the experience of the men who have gone before him. The people of this State, whether for weal or woe, located the University of Illinois in a village, 125 miles from any important collection of books. Speaking generally, therefore, the library which is to quicken and. stimulate and fructify scholarship and investigation at the University of Illinois must be a library located upon the campus of the University. We need, therefore, a much larger collection of* books, other things being equal, than does the University of Chicago, or Harvard, or Yale, or Columbia, or Pennsylvania, all of which institutions are located within easy reach of collections which in the aggregate are two or three or four times their own collections. The following list gives the number of volumes in twelve libraries of the universities of this country:

Number of volumes in other available libraries in the neighborhood. 1,830,000 109,000 3,230,000 30,000 82,000 1*393,000 1,359,000 5,000 8,000 37,000 338,000 34,000

' Name.

Number of volumes in library.

Cost of Library building.

1 Harvard 2 Yale 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Cornell Wisconsin Chicago Pennsylvania Princeton Michigan California Brown. Illinois

8S2,104 600,000 450,000 395,209 384,000 357,411 334,400 372,300 270,998 210,000 191,000 188,000

$ 550,000 00 1,100,000 00 260,000 00 610,000 00 (?)1,000,000 00 800,000 00

160,000 00

Harvard University has access to additional collections amounting to more than two millions of volumes. The New York collections of four millions of volumes are accessible to Yale within a two hours'' ride. Pennsylvania has, of course, Johns Hopkins and W ashington on one side, Princeton and New York on the other, within easy reach: while Princeton has Philadelphia on one hand and New York on the other.

It will be seen that the collections of the University of Illinois are very far inferior to those of Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Chicago, although all these institutions are located in the midst of a very hotbed, so to speak, of other library collections. It will also be seen that the University of Illinois is inferior in actual number of books, to Cornell and Michigan and Wisconsin, though Michigan does not have an agricultural school in connection with it, and therefore does not need the great segment of a. university library represented by the agricultural literature of the world. It is plain that the University of Illinois cannot hope to take its' place among the great institutions of the world as a real center of learning and investigation until it has much larger library facilities.