Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - 16 Years (Edmund James) [PAGE 112]

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Libraries and Museums

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miles or so—and 600,000 cards to index them. But when the wide range of subjects is considered and the varied lines of instruction and research are divided into this collection, each department seems to have only begun to collect the material which it needs. The library dwarfs by reason of the vastness of its field. All of agriculture, all of engineering, all of science and useful arts (except medicine, dentistry and pharmacy, which have a separate library of 22,576 volumes in Chicago), all of the literature and the humanities, all human knowledge in fact, save theology, must be represented in this library. This is a broad field to cover. Specialization and concentration in thirty-five or fifty subjects makes a large collection necessary. Nor will it do to compare Illinois with institutions which have no colleges of agriculture or engineering. Neither has Illinois a group of large libraries close at hand upon whose resources the investigator may draw, as is the ease with Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania and others in or near large cities. Because of this wide range of interests and its isolation, the 387,999 volumes now at Illinois do not compare favorably with the equipment of other institutions nor with that needed for efficient instruction and research such as is expected of an institution offering much graduate work. The Library was established at the very beginning of tho institution. In 1867 the trustees bought 644 volumes with $1000 appropriated for that purpose, and so important did this purchase seem that Regent Gregory made personal selection of them. But the Library's marked growth has been only during the last seventeen years. Until 1897 no amount appropriated for books was higher than $1500 per annum. With the new building then erected the annual appropriation was made $10,000 and this has been enlarged year by year through $20,000 and $25,000 appropriations until the serious and determined effort of the administration to make this an important library has considerably increased that amount. The result has been a rapid in* crease in the size of the Library. Numbering 70,000 volumes in 1904, in 1918 this has been increased fivefold; to be exact, to 387.999 volumes on June 30, 1918. The sums actually ex-