Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1944 [PAGE 1072]

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U N I V E R S I T Y OF I L L I N O I S

I069

of library staff is another index. During this ten-year period the University of Illinois was able exactly to double its staff (from 69 employees to 138). The appropriation for salaries at the University library in ten years has increased from approximately $165,000 to $245,000. Appropriations for books, periodicals, and bindings have remained practically the same, around $125,000 annually throughout the period. Although the library does not keep its circulation statistics in such a way as to separate faculty use from student use, the average circulation per person has followed the same trends as those in a group of university libraries studied" over the tenyear period, 1927 to 1937. There is evidence to indicate that normally freshmen and sophomores use the library less than upperclassmen. With this in mind, the increased circulation per person in the University of Illinois library during the years in which the enrollment was rapidly expanding is a significant fact, since during that period the relative numbers of freshmen and sophomores in the institution were higher than previously. It might have been expected that the library circulation per person would decline. However, such was not the case. A recent report 13 shows the locations of the leading collections for advanced study and research in American libraries. The American Library Association Board on Resources of American Libraries drew up a list of 75 subjects and asked approximately 500 authorities where, in their opinion, the best library collections are to be found. The following list contains the names of university libraries each of which was judged to have ten or more such collections: Harvard, California, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Yale, Cornell, Minnesota, Princeton, Illinois, Stanford, Duke, Texas, New York University, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins, Washington, Iowa State College, Ohio State University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In relation to other libraries in this group, Illinois stands eleventh. It must be noted, however, that this type of ranking on the basis of number of collections tends to give the advantage to large li"American Library Association: College and University Library Service, Chicago, 1938. "Robert C. Downs: "Leading American Collections," Library Quarterly, XII (July 1042).

[A.C.E. Report—51]