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Caption: Book - 16 Years (Edmund James)
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Libraries and Mtiseums 101 previous work which bears upon his immediate problem, and without which he could not undertake to solve it. It acts further as a great stimulus to scientific work on the part of the members of an instructional staff, and on 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 impenetrable 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 , the University of Illinois must be a library located upon t" jf campus of the University. 1 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:
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