College and Research Libraries


By F R A N K A. L U N D Y 

Philosophical Concepts of 

Professional Organization 

MY P U R P O S E in appearing before you is to consider with you several 
questions about college and university 
librarianship. These are questions to 
which I do not have the answers. Ap-
parently, you d o not have the answers. 
If you had, you would have given them 
effective formulation in speech and in 
writing, and through organization and 
action. These remarks of mine would 
then be unnecessary. I may not have the 
answers, but I do have some opinions 
which I will gladly share with you. 
These are, then, my personal reflections 
upon our common problems. 

T H E A M E R I C A N L I B R A R Y A S S O C I A T I O N 

T h e American Library Association 
was founded in 1876 and is now well 
past its seventy-fifth anniversary. T h e 
object of the association, which I take 
to be the all-pervading purpose which 
has brought about its present state of 
maturity, is, according to its constitu-
tion: "to promote library service and 
librarianship." T h e key to the meaning 
of this phrase is the verb "promote." I 
have no quarrel with this definition of 
purpose. 

T h e many services of A L A to the 
cause of libraries are beyond question. 
A L A tries to be all-inclusive. It offers 
the means for organization, discussion, 

Mr. Lundy is Director of Libraries, 
University of Nebraska. This paper was 
presented at the meeting of the Univer-
sity Libraries Section, ACRL, Washing-
ton, D. C., Jnne 24, 1959. 

cooperation, publication, and action. 
Through its divisions it reaches adult 
services, children's services, reference 
services, library education, and library 
administration generally. Through its 
member associations it provides for pub-
lic, school, and state libraries, for hos-
pital and institution libraries, and for 
our own group, the college and research 
libraries. Let us note in passing that 
autonomy and the benefits of isolation, 
dubious though they sometimes may be, 
are still preferred by libraries of law, 
theology, and medicine, and also by that 
widely diversified group of libraries 
which make up the Special Libraries As-
sociation. 

W h o are these more than twenty 
thousand librarians who make up ALA? 
By and large they are the practicing li-
brarians. They are the individuals who 
hold more or less responsible assign-
ments in a library of one kind or anoth-
er. A library, I take it, is a collection of 
books brought together to serve a pur-
pose. Libraries are not organized for 
profit. Library purposes are usually 
spelled out in terms of information, edu-
cation, research, and recreation. 

Membership may be held in A L A , and 
hence in any of its divisions or member 
associations, according to its constitu-
tion, by "any person . . . interested in li-
brary work . . . upon payment of the 
dues provided for. . . ." Anyone with 
six dollars in his pocket and an inclina-
tion to spend this into the treasury of 
A L A , may thereafter produce his mem-
bership card as evidence of the fact that 
he is a librarian. I cannot say that this 

NO V EMBER 1959 487 



is bad, either for the individual, or for 
the association. I have read somewhere 
that there are thirty-five or forty thou-
sand individuals in these United States 
who are likely prospects for membership 
in our association, including the more 
than twenty thousand who have already 
joined. I should like to see all forty 
thousand in the membership. If A L A 
could do nothing other than point with 
pride to an occasional achievement of 
the nature and stature of the Library 
Services Act of Congress, it would still 
be worth more than its weight in dues 
to all the membership and to the entire 
country. 

T h e point I wish to make here is that 
anyone may be a librarian, and literally 
anyone w h o will pay the dues may join 
the national association of librarians, 
attend and vote in its meetings, and 
otherwise take an active part in its work 
on a basis of parity with any and all 
other members. There are no minimum 
educational standards of any kind for 
being a librarian and for becoming a 
member of our association, nor are there 
any quantitative or qualitative standards 
of performance in the j o b of librarian. 
Literally, a collection of fifty or a hun-
dred books, housed in the corner of the 
village grocery store, or in the county 
court house, may be designated a library, 
and the local citizen who sits in charge 
one or two afternoons a week, a librar-
ian. I am not sure that this is as it should 
be. Such circumstances as those I des-
cribe are fairly numerous and appear to 
influence and condition the apathy and 
indifference with which the taxpaying 
public sometimes looks upon us and our 
work. An adequate income for our as-
sociation is a most essential considera-
tion, of course, but it might be well to 
have another look at the fact that at 
present the ability and willingness to 
part with six dollars annually is the 
only real and effective requirement for 
membership in A L A . Not even the six 

dollars is necessary for designation as a 
librarian. Almost anyone may set him-
self up as a librarian, in the public's 
understanding, and he does not have 
to pay dues to anything. 

These remarks are addressed specifi-
cally to college and university librarians, 
and they are literally intended only for 
college and university librarians. I sense 
that I am on insecure ground when I 
imply a sweeping criticism of A L A . 
Within its means this organization has 
accomplished great things in the interest 
of providing more books to more people 
in the United States and abroad. If all 
of us in this room now had a free hand 
in organizing the present A L A member-
ship of more than twenty thousand 
individuals, I am not as all sure that we 
would come up with something different 
that would be as effective generally as 
what we have had. I am not proposing 
another study of reorganization. Good 
minds within the membership have al-
ready taken A L A through several re-
organizations during our lifetimes. What 
I have in mind as our basic problem ac-
tually may not very closely relate to the 
present organization of A L A . 

C O L L E G E AND U N I V E R S I T Y L I B R A R I A N S 

T o put the matter bluntly, I am con-
cerned about the definition and the or-
ganization of the entire group of college 
and university librarians. T o be more 
specific, I am concerned about their lack 
of definition and organization. T h e larg-
er aspects of all librarianship in Amer-
ica, as represented in the total A L A , can 
easily take us too far afield, instead of 
leading us to specific and helpful solu-
tions for our special problems. W e col-
lege and university librarians need to 
look at our own problems, and there 
are many! Our problems are going to 
increase in number and in complexity 
as college enrollments rise from their 
present three million to more than five 
million students—-and all this by 1965, 

488 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



it is said. Nor will all of these major 
problems face all of us in equal terms. 
T h e swelling enrollments of college stu-
dents on the campuses of several large 
state universities are posing library prob-
lems that at times seem overwhelming. 
Do you think that we can turn our backs 
upon these problems of organization and 
service? I do not think so! Nor do I 
think that we can solve all of our prob-
lems individually and alone on our sep-
arate campuses, although we may have 
to try. It seems clearly apparent to me 
that we must improve our opportunities 
for working together. W e cannot always 
expect to go forward effectively, serving 
the best interests of the masses of stu-
dents who come to us for a higher edu-
cation, and the interests of our faculties 
as well, unless we are willing to face 
some of the shortcomings and omissions 
in our present activities. W e must plan 
continuous, and perhaps radical, im-
provement in the collective organiza-
tional environment within which we 
are working. 

There is, as you know, a steering com-
mittee for this A C R L section of univer-
sity librarians and this committee has, 
during the past two years, held several 
spirited discussions of the problems of 
professional organization. I am a mem-
ber of this steering committee and I 
have its permission to be as frank with 
you as I may wish. 

A C R L 

A C R L has many accomplishments to 
its credit. Perhaps the most evident of 
these is the excellent journal, College 
and Research Libraries, published con-
tinuously since 1939; and also, of more 
recent origin, the ACRL Monographs. 
It is not appropriate here to list and 
describe the association's many other 
activities, such as subsidies for college 
book collections, college and university 
library surveys under A L A sponsorship, 
and the many outstanding program 

meetings. Special mention should be 
made of the many courtesies and serv-
ices coming directly from the office of 
the A C R L executive secretary. 

But the fact remains that when the 
Association of American Universities' 
Commission on Financing Higher Edu-
cation produced its studies in the early 
part of the 1950's and levied specific 
criticisms against librarians on univer-
sity campuses, there appeared to be no 
effective means to bring this matter un-
der continuous study within A C R L . 
There was, of course, a program on the 
subject, and the commission's executive 
director, John D. Millett, faced the li-
brarians in person. It remained, how-
ever, for a private organization outside 
A L A , known as the Association of Re-
search Libraries (ARL), to organize the 
Monticello Conference on this subject. 
Parenthetically, can you even imagine 
where we might bring this same prob-
lem under study now within the newly 
reorganized ALA?—somewhere within 
the vast domain of the Library Adminis-
tration Division, no doubt, in a com-
mittee composed of assorted librarians 
from many and diverse types of librar-
ies! I do not mention the incident of the 
Monticello Conference and the causes 
which produced it as evidence of neg-
lect on the part of the collective body of 
u n i v e r s i t y librarians. Through the 
A C R L program meeting and the A R L 
discussions at Monticello and the many 
more localized discussions of the same 
problem, it is evident that the questions 
raised by the Commission on Financing 
Higher Education were adequately an-
swered, at least sufficiently at that time. 

On many occasions I have asked my 
colleagues in university librarianship 
where the major problems of university 
libraries do actually come into focus, 
for discussion and analysis, within A L A . 
I have in mind such problems as those 
pertaining to the framing and manage-
ment of a budget, cooperative buying, 

NO V EMBER 1959 489 



the recruitment and direction of per-
sonnel, the status of the academic librar-
ian, and many others in the realm of 
administration which are over and be-
yond those having to do with collec-
tion-building and bibliographical con-
trol. T h e answers I get are usually vague. 
Committees scattered throughout A L A 
can be mentioned in connection with 
some few of the specific points at issue. 
But there is no real "home base"—is 
there?—within the whole A L A for the 
problems of university libraries and 
their librarians. 

It is true that many of these problems 
have points at issue in common with 
similiar ones in other library environ-
ments: in the public library, the special 
library, the county or state library, or 
the Library of Congress. It is also true 
that the problems of university librar-
ians are uniquely conditioned by their 
own environment, which is the univer-
sity campus. T h e special factors on the 
campus are the faculty, the students, and 
the governmental structure of a univer-
sity. There have been many occasions 
on which I have wished fervently that 
I could take some of my problems into 
discussion with colleagues in university 
librarianship, in order to put them un-
der systematic study by committees com-
posed of other university librarians with 
similar problems and with like inter-
ests. 

T h e A C R L University Libraries Sec-
tion has produced an unbroken series 
of excellent papers and speeches on col-
lege and university library topics. I can 
only hope that I am not, at this moment, 
damaging this fine record. But, for the 
most part, the association, and this sec-
tion in particular, has been content with 
papers and speeches. It is in no real 
sense a "home base" for the problems 
of university libraries and their librar-
ians. I cannot help adding that under 
the present plan of reorganization within 
A L A the A C R L University Libraries 

Section is actually faced with the pros-
pect of going out of existence altogether, 
except as a polite token of recognition 
may be extended to it in the programs 
of the annual summer conference. All of 
the basic studies of library activities are 
now being assigned to the activity di-
visions of A L A . There is a real danger, 
I d o believe, in discarding the college 
or university campus as a conditioning 
factor of the utmost importance in rela-
tion to some of our problems. 

What I am saying is that A C R L — 
despite its publications and fine program 
meetings and its occasional efforts to 
grapple with other matters—is not the 
strong and all-embracing national as-
sociation of college and university li-
brarians that it might well be, or, in 
my opinion, that it should be. There 
has been reason to believe, on some 
occasions, that many of our university 
librarians do not want a strong national 
association within their ranks, or d o not 
recognize the potential of strength that 
might be developed in such an organi-
zation for studying contemporary prob-
lems of library policy and administra-
tion on the campus. I cannot agree with 
these few that each of us is essentially 
in business for himself. But I do not 
believe that this attitude has been the 
determining factor in opposition to the 
development of such an association. 
There are two such factors, however, 
to which we should give our attention. 

T H E A S S O C I A T I O N O F R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S 

T h e first of these is the Association of 
Research Libraries. T h e nature and pur-
pose of this association are frequently 
misunderstood. A R L , as it is called, was 
founded in 1931. Its object is "by co-
operative effort, to develop and increase 
the resources and usefulness of the re-
search collections in American librar-
ies." Essentially, what this has meant 
through three decades of continuous 
effort is that A R L has taken a very ef-

490 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



fective interest in collection-building 
and in bibliographical controls. I know 
of no worthier purposes to which a 
group such as A R L might address itself 
and, as you well know, its accomplish-
ments have been many and highly signif-
icant. 

There appears to be a curious lack of 
effective communication between A R L 
and A C R L . This is true despite the fact 
that a majority of the participants in 
the meetings of A R L are also mem-
bers of A L A , and customarily participate 
in the meetings of ACRL's University 
Libraries Section, and in a few other 
A L A activities. There are a few A R L 
participants who merely look briefly in 
upon the early part of the A L A week 
and then go home. These few are chief-
ly the history professors in the A R L . 
Usually they are not those who have 
given years to the formal graduate study 
of librarianship as well as to its practice. 

A R L is an organization of libraries, 
and not of individual librarians. Each 
member institution is entitled to be rep-
resented by one individual at meetings 
of the association, and this individual is 
nearly always the director of the library. 
T h e membership of A R L has for many 
years approximated fifty institutions, or 
slightly fewer. There is, to be frank with 
you, no magic in the number fifty. There 
are a few librarians among the present 
membership of A R L who believe that 
the association could more efficiently de-
vote itself to its purposes and projects 
if its membership could be reduced to 
the twenty-five or so institutions who 
thus far have really exercised leadership 
in collection-building among our re-
search institutions. However attractive 
this view may be in theory, there has at 
no time been a majority willing to vote 
in its favor. On the other hand, there 
are also a few librarians among the pres-
ent membership who believe that the 
number of member institutions might 
very well be increased to seventy-five— 

perhaps even to one hundred—in order 
that the association might be truly more 
representative of the research libraries 
of America than it now is; also in order 
that it might broaden the scope of its 
interests and the activities of its com-
mittees. This proposition, too, has failed 
to command a majority vote. And so the 
membership remains for the present sta-
bilized at approximately fifty. 

How are these fifty memberships de-
termined? That is an interesting ques-
tion! In recent years, at intervals of five 
years, A R L has had a critical look at its 
membership. It has, on those occasions, 
collected and scanned a quantity of da-
ta concerning present members and ap-
plicants for membership. At no time, to 
my knowledge, has there been an actual 
agreement on the quantitative or qual-
itative data that might be taken as pre-
requisite to actual election. T h e voting 
process is, therefore, a subjective one. 
Rarely has a member been dropped! 
Each of those few occasions has involved 
a good deal of emotional soul-searching 
among "the brothers." Only occasionally 
is a member added, as some of you know 
only too well. 

In its organizational structure, A R L is 
essentially a private club. I am only too 
well aware that for having divulged that 
secret I may be severely disciplined, or 
thrown out of its membership—though 
not, I hope, the institution which I have 
been representing! Further evidence of 
what I have just said about a private 
club is to be found in A R L ' s governing 
body, an advisory committee of five which 
is self-perpetuating. When a member of 
this committee has served his term of 
several years, and during his last year on 
the committee has also presided at A R L 
meetings, this committee then meets to 
decide who among the total membership 
shall succeed the retiring member. This 
is in no sense an election and the sub-
sequent approval voted by the associa-
tion as a whole is purely a formality. 

NO V EMBER 1959 491 



I am not in any way personally op-
posed to this arrangement for the gov-
ernment of the club. There are many oc-
casions in American political and profes-
sional life when one is strongly tempted 
to conclude that a benevolent despotism, 
or a benevolent oligarchy, may some-
times be the best of all forms of man-
agement. T h e open question resides in 
the word "benevolent." Sometimes this 
concept has a short life. This idea re-
minds me that prominently upon the 
face of the magnificent state capitol 
building in Lincoln, Nebraska, there is 
carved the following legend: " T h e Salva-
tion of the State Is Watchfulness in the 
Citizens." I have heard this casually in-
terpreted as meaning: "You have to 
watch these rascals!" In order that you 
may fully appreciate the beauty of our 
governmental climate in Nebraska, I 
should also like to share with you the 
companion inscription on the opposite 
side of the building, which reads: "Po-
litical Society Exists for the Sake of 
Noble Living." 

T h e essential point to my remarks 
about A R L is simply that this is a pri-
vate and somewhat exclusive organiza-
tion which does excellent work in the 
limited field of librarianship to which it 
has addressed itself. Further, that A C R L 
does a disservice to all college and uni-
versity libraries when it mistakenly de-
fers to A R L , or to any other organized 
group of librarians outside its own ranks, 
in undertaking the study of problems 
that deserve its immediate attention. In-
stances of such mistaken deference could 
be mentioned between A C R L and A R L 
and also between A C R L and the A L A 
activities divisions. If A C R L is to be 
governed entirely by administrative fiat 
from other agencies of this unwieldy 
holding corporation, it will shortly go 
out of business. In fact, you might well 
consider if this is not what is actually 
happening now! Even if you are willing 
to grant to A R L all primary interest 

and initiative in collection-building and 
bibliographical control among research 
libraries, there will still remain several 
problem areas of special interest to col-
lege and university libraries as a group. 
These problem areas concern our li-
braries in the environment of higher 
education, and irrespective of whether 
the point at issue may be their manage-
ment and administration, the quality of 
the staff, the physical plant, the place of 
the library in the academic community, 
or some other equally important phase 
of the institution's operation. 

P R O F E S S I O N A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S 

T h e underlying cause of our predica-
ment is a lack of professional conscious-
ness among us. My barber talks to me 
frequently about the problems of his 
"profession." Some of his conversation 
pertains to the "tricks of the trade" which 
have to do with scissors and comb, tonics 
and lotions, and sanitary regulations. Oc-
casionally he mentions hours of work, 
union dues, and the lone barbers who 
won't join up. At the other end of 
the scale of occupations that either 
have professional status, or aspire to 
have it, are the medical doctors—the 
M.D.'s. Here, I believe, is a truly profes-
sional group, in terms of standards of 
training and performance, ideals of serv-
ice, the organization of medical care 
through clinics and hospitals, and the 
improvement and guidance of all these 
through the activities of local and na-
tional medical societies. Underlying good 
medical care and effective organization 
for this purpose among doctors is their 
firm concept of basic training. N o one 
practices medicine without having com-
pleted medical training, and in a school 
accredited for that purpose. Did you ever 
hear of a one-semester doctor, or a one-
year doctor? No, and you never will! He 
either completed the medical course, or 
he didn't! T h e same, be it noted, is 
true of the law! N o one in these days 

492 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



can aspire to practice law by simply 
"reading some law," although this ap-
pears to have been common practice 
seventy-five years ago. 

Between these two extremes, the doc-
tor and the barber, where do we librar-
ians stand? Are we really trying with dis-
cernible effect to take our place among 
other recently emerging professions; for 
example, alongside the dentists and 
pharmacists, the social workers and the 
clinical psychologists? Are we strengthen-
ing the standards of our professional 
work as librarians and also the basic 
training we consider to be prerequisite 
to it? No, actually, I think not! 

It is true, to be sure, that during the 
past thirty years the principal library 
schools have become associated with col-
leges and universities. T h e old Certif-
icate in Librarianship has been abol-
ished and the Master of Arts (or Master 
of Science) degree has been standard-
ized. T h e Doctor of Philosophy in Li-
brarianship has emerged. T h e Ph.D. de-
gree in librarianship may have arrived 
just "in the nick of time." There has 
been a noticeable trend among college 
and university presidents in recent years 
to use the head librarianship of the ac-
ademic institution as a convenient place 
to store one or more of the oversupply 
of individuals trained essentially to teach 
history, or English, or some other sub-
ject. May I take it simply as evidence of 
the acute shortage of librarians trained 
at the top level that we do not observe 
the reverse of this phenomenon: the ap-
pointment of doctors of philosophy in 
librarianship to be full professors of his-
tory and chairmen of their departments? 
When I referred to the standardization 
of the Master's degree in librarianship a 
moment ago, you must realize, of course, 
that I was being somewhat facetious. A 
few of our recent graduates in librarian-
ship—a small few, fortunately—seem to 
have no clear notions at all as to what 
is expected of them on the job. 

T h e medical doctors do not solve their 
complicated problems of effective organ-
ization by blanketing in all the individ-
uals who in any way relate to the prac-
tice of medicine. You will not find in the 
membership of the American Medical 
Association, or in the local county med-
ical society, all of the nurses, laboratory 
technicians, and hospital administrators 
— t o say nothing of receptionists and of-
fice help, custodians and ambulance driv-
ers! Quite the contrary is true! T o the 
extent that these various groups need 
organization in order to sustain and im-
prove their work, the doctors encourage 
them to develop their own organizations, 
with or without close supervision. 

Librarians, on the other hand, have an 
evangelical approach to organization. In 
effect and without pausing to reason 
what for, we cry: "Come one and come 
all! Pay your six dollars and join u p ! " 
W e college and university librarians are 
no exception. W e live and work in ac-
ademic communities populated with 
highly trained men and women. T h e li-
brary is an essential part of the complex 
process of higher education and research. 
W e sorely need enforceable standards 
of training and performance. 

What happens to the college and uni-
versity librarians who do attend the an-
nual summer conference of ALA? Here, 
at least, you would join me in expecting 
to find a large number of these men and 
women meeting together in a variety of 
close-knit ways to study and to resolve 
some of their common problems. I re-
peat here that the academic community 
in which they work at home provides 
an essential bond—one which should not 
lightly be ignored or dissolved. There is 
little good for most of us in the notion 
that our special interests can just as well 
be scattered throughout the entire rank 
and file of A L A . This very tendency 
within A L A has long been an effective 
and permanent barrier between our ac-
ademic group, on the one hand, and the 

NO V EMBER 1959 493 



legal, medical, and "special" librarians 
on the other hand—all of whom, for 
very obvious reasons, prefer to meet to-
gether in their own restricted groups, for 
the sake of close association and inten-
sive discussion. 

University librarians have contributed 
a degree of leadership to A L A which is 
entirely out of proportion to their actual 
numbers within its total membership. 
This is, of course, a credit to the uni-
versity librarians! Where d o you find 
them during the course of this confer-
ence week? You will find them scattered 
throughout A L A , giving speeches, con-
ducting meetings, attending numerous 
committees, and behaving generally like 
the prima donnas and professional mo-
nologists which most of them habitually 
are. 

You may have noted that this partic-
ular meeting of university librarians was 
scheduled unhappily, but without pro-
test, at 4:30 in the afternoon—the dead-
liest hour of any conference day! If you 
will look around you will also notice 
that many of the participants in last Sun-
day's meeting of the Association of Re-
search Libraries have already gone home. 
Last Monday afternoon, many of you 
may have attended the program meetings 
of either the Library Organization and 
Management Section of the Library 
Administration Division, or of the Re-
sources and Technical Services Division, 
both scheduled at the same hour. T h e 
content of the latter meeting concerned 
that important and far-reaching new de-
velopment known as "Cataloging in 
Source." Again, unhappily, but ap-
parently without protest, the leadership 
of some twenty research libraries in the 
Middle West was precluded from at-
tending either meeting because of a 
wholly unnecessary conflict with the ad-
visory group of the Midwest Inter-Li-
brary Center. 

My point, with reference to all of us, 
college and university librarians alike, is 
that such dissipation and scattering of 

our energies and efforts have become 
habitual with us. W e do need a na-
tional association of college and univer-
sity librarians. W e need a strong, hard-
working, and effective organization for 
the study and solution of our major 
problems on the academic campus. W e 
need an organization whose purposes and 
whose conferences can enjoy a high de-
gree of preference among the members, 
over all the distractions and dissipations 
that are customarily thrown in our way. 
And we need, above all, to make this a 
professional organization—not simply a 
collection of all the individuals in the 
community who happen in any way to 
be involved in the work of the campus 
library. W e need these things—but we 
have never had them—and we most cer-
tainly do not have them now! 

A T T R I B U T E S O F A P R O F E S S I O N 

One more word on the idea of a pro-
fession. Among the attributes of a profes-
sion we note the possession of a dis-
tinctive body of special knowledge and 
a superior skill in its use, held in com-
mon by its members, under the com-
pulsion of a sense of high personal re-
sponsibility. W e note a recognition of 
its obligation to extend this body of 
knowledge by research and scientific ob-
servation of practice, with a sharing of 
the results. W e note the motivation of 
social duty and honorable service, pre-
ferred above personal gain. W e note 
established means for the adequate ed-
ucation of its novitiates. W e note stand-
ards of qualifications based upon train-
ing and competency, character and eth-
ical perception and conduct. And we 
note a group organization with national 
standing concerned with public interest. 

Some of these we college and uni-
versity librarians have achieved. W e have 
a distinctive body of special knowledge. 
If you do not believe this, will you please 
take time to look carefully into the con-
tent of the library school libraries at the 
Universities of Chicago or Illinois, to 

494 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



mention only two. W e have a publica-
tion program for recording and sharing 
the results of our research. If we are not 
strongly motivated by social duty we 
work in vain, for private profit is no-
where in evidence. W e have the means 
for adequate education in our several li-
brary schools, some of them of excellent 
reputation. But we have almost entirely 
avoided setting standards of qualification 
based upon training and competency. 
Despite our several library schools of 
quality and their graduate training pro-
grams, we still d o say "anybody is wel-
come to be a librarian," and we mean 
literally "anybody." It may be for this 
reason alone that we college and uni-
versity librarians have not achieved a 
group organization with national stand-
ing. 

W e college and university librarians 
are an incomplete and badly scattered 
fragment of A L A . A R L , standing sep-
arate and apart, is but a very small part 
of all of us. It is limited in membership 
and in scope and is in no way an ade-
quate substitute for a strong national as-
sociation composed of the professional 
staff members of all college and uni-
versity libraries. A C R L is at present a 
somewhat frustrated and deteriorating 
division of the total A L A . 

Last year your steering committee of 
this University Libraries Section under-
took to submit ten or twelve projects 
upon which it would like to go to work 

now. It was told at once that all but one 
or two of these proposals appeared to be 
"out of bounds" for the section in the 
reorganized A L A , since they were more 
properly assignable to the committees 
and sections of the activities divisions of 
A L A . At this point of transfer and re-
assignment, let me remind you, the ac-
ademic community entirely loses its iden-
tity, since the activities divisions derive 
their memberships from libraries of 
every possible size and type—except, as 
we noted, from legal, medical, and "spe-
cial" libraries, which have remained en-
tirely apart and which, apparently, are 
wiser in such matters! Such actions, it 
seems to me, are based upon a funda-
mental and tragic fallacy in our total 
organization. 

In support of these remarks I offer 
you my own experiences of thirty years 
of continuous membership in A L A and 
also those of the past fifteen years during 
which I have been the director of a typ-
ical state university library of medium 
size. Although I have written many pa-
pers for our journals, made speeches on 
a variety of occasions, and am generally 
regarded as an inveterate convention-
goer, I must admit that the quest for 
identification for the academic library 
which I now direct and represent, and 
for the solution of some of its many 
problems, is becoming increasingly dif-
ficult. 

Surely, we can do better! Most sincere-
ly, I hope that we will—and soon! 

Eastern Librarians 
T h e Forty-Fifth Annual Conference of Eastern College Librarians will be held on 

November 28 at the Harkness Academic Theatre, Butler Library, Columbia Uni-
versity. T h e conference's theme is "Where Shall the Academic Library Find Its 
Leadership?" Speakers include Robert E. Moody, John F. Harvey, William S. 
Dix, and Louis Shores. T h e morning program will start at 10 a.m., with Rev. 
John H. Harrington presiding. John Frost will preside at the afternoon session. 
Chairman of the Program Committee is Wayne Shirley, librarian of Finch College. 
No advance registration is necessary. 

NO V EMBER 1959 495