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Caption: Book - 16 Years (Edmund James)
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104 Sixteen Tears art the University of Illinois what similar laws existed in this and other states and this and other countries. He desired to know further what the experience had been where similar attempts had been made. I found on inquiry that our University Library could not answer any of these questions involved in these simple and yet fundamental inquiries. There was no collection of the laws relating to the regulation of the milk industry either in this country or abroad. There was no way of finding out where this kind of experiment had been tried in this country or abroad, or how it had worked out. 1 ' One of the fundamental distinctions between our American universities as a whole and European universities, is to be found in this matter of library facilities, and I believe that one of the reasons why American scholarship has limped along at such a distance behind European scholarship is to be found in the lack of such inspiration and the lack of such assistance as are afforded by great collections of books, which contain in themselves the recorded experience of the human race." 1 PROGRESS FROM 1904 TO 1918 That the efforts made during the last decade or more to increase the library facilities of the University have resulted in substantial additions to the number of volumes owned, is indicated by the fact that whereas there were but 66,239 books on the shelves of the Library in 1904, the number had risen by June 30, 1918, to 387,999 volumes,2—an increase of over 485 per cent for the fourteen year period. A very complete account of the development of the Library during this period is given in the following statement by Mr. F. K. W. Drury, Assistant Librarian of the University:8 A "third of a million volumes" sounds like a considerable number of items. They take considerable shelf room—seven *A memorandum on the needs of the Library presented to the Board of Trustees by the President of the University at a meeting held June 7, 1912.—Rept., Univ. of 111., 1912, p. 595 ^Does not include the 22,576 volumes in the libraries of the Chicago Departments. *A revision by Mr. Drury, for this report, of an article contributed by him to the Alumni Quarterly in April, 1915.
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