Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - 16 Years (Edmund James) [PAGE 109]

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Sixteen Years at the University of Illinois

Number of volumes in library. 882,104 600,000 450,000 395,209 384,000 357,411 334,400 372,300 270,998 210,000 191,000 188,000 Number of volumes in other available l i b r a r i e s 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 37,000 838,000 34,000 Cost of Library Building.

Name

2 Yale 3 Columbia •4 Cornell •6 Chicago

• •.. •

$ 550,000.00 1,100,000.00 260,000.00 610,000.00 (1)1,000,000.00 800,000.00

$ 10 11 12

Michigan.... California.« Brown. nifaftta

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 Washington 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. " I t 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. " I t 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. 1 ' The University should look forward to the accumulation of a collection of at least a million of books as rapidly as is at