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Caption: Book - 16 Years (Edmund James)
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CHAPTER IV LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS The importance to a university of adequate library and museum facilities can scarcely be overestimated. Unless a university is willing to cut loose from the past with its accumulated knowledge, and from the outside world of the present day with its incredibly rapid progress in the fields of science and industry, means must be provided for making a knowledge of the activities of other men readily accessible to the investigator, be he student or professor. Apparently in the early years of the University the necessity of providing for the ordinary maintenance of the various departments, and later, for additional land and buildings urgently needed, as well, seemed to the trustees to preclude the possibility of making material annual additions to the University library or museums. As a result the University of Illinois was soon outstript in this respect by its sister institutions of learning, and it is only by following a policy within recent years of making annual appropriations of considerable size for these purposes, that the University is beginning to make a respectable showing in this essential form of equipment of an institution of learning. "Among all the institutes or departments of a university, none is of more fundamental necessity than the university library. No scientific work can be done nowadays of any real value, aside from those extraordinary cases of genius which occur now and then in human history and which seem to be independent of all conditions and exceptions to all rules, without the aid of an adequate library. "The library, of course, contains the result of the experience of the human race up to the present time. It is of value from various points of view. First of all, it saves time, inasmuch as men need not undertake to do again scientific work which has already been done. It provides the assistance which a scientific man needs by putting at his disposition the results of all 100
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