College and Research Libraries LOGAN WILSON Library Roles in American Higher Education This paper was delivered May 12, 1969, at the First U.S. Conference on Libraries and Information Science in Higher Education, held in Tokyo, Japan. We print it here because it is indicative of the American Council on Education's current interest in libraries. BEING NEITHER A LIBRARIAN nor an in- formation science expert, I appear as an amateur among professionals so far as the technical content of this impor- tant conference is concerned. True, dur- ing my youth I worked one summer as a stack boy in a college library, and I once contributed a minor item to the Library Quarterly. These experiences hardly warrant my coming almost 8,000 miles from Washington-even to such a delightful country as Japan-to tell lead- ing librarians things they already know about libraries! Regarding the interrelations between libraries and higher education, how- ever, I can speak from a background of varied experience as a student, teacher, and administrator on more than a dozen different college and university cam- puses. For the past eight years I have been with the American Council on Ed- ucation, an association of more than 1,500 colleges, universities, and other educational agencies; this national per- spective has given me a further appreci- ation of the vital role that libraries play in the conservation, dissemination, and advancement of education. As we consider the interrelations be- Dr. Wilson is President, American Coun- cil on Education. 96 / tween libraries and educational institu- tions, it may be useful to review briefly the changing functions of libraries and librarians. In America, the first libraries were rather limited book collections for even more limited circles of readers. Perhaps inevitably the early librarian was thought of primarily as a guardian or human watchdog. One of his first du- ties was to preserve from harm the scarce and valuable commodities in his custody. Instead of trying to put books and periodicals into as many hands as possible, the librarian's main task ap- parently was to keep them out of the wrong hands. An amusing account of the early role of the American librarian is to be found in The Old Librarian's Almanack, al- leged to have been written in 1773 by one Jared Bean. Some of his admoni- tions are as follows: Keep your Books behind stout Gratings and in no wise let any Person come at them to take them from the Shelf except y ourself. It were better that no Person enter the Library (save the Librarian Himself) and that the Books Be kept in Safety, than that one Book be lost, or others Misplac'd. Guard well your Books,-this is always your foremost Duty. Question each Applicant closely. See that he be a Person of good Reputation, scholarly Habits, sober and courteous De- meanour. Any mere Trifler, a Person that would Dally with Books, or seek in them shallow Amusement, may be Dismiss' d without delay. Our old librarian goes on to caution against admitting to the library anyone younger than twenty years, advises strong suspicions of all women, and the complete exclusion of politicians, astrolo- gers, teachers of false knowledge, fanatic preachers, and refugees. He further counsels the true librarian to cast out and destroy all books merely frivolous and empty of serious meaning. Finally, he praises the librarian as one who "lives protected, avaricious neither of money nor of worldly fame, and happy in the goodliest of all occupations,-the pursuit of wisdom." With the expansion of education and the growth of knowledge, the librarian emerged from his initial role as guard- ian of carefully culled knowledge for the select few into a second, predomi- nant role. In this second stage he may be described as the omnivorous collec- tor of practically anything in print. This period saw the rise of American pub- lic, college, and university libraries from the base of the subscription library. All over the United States libraries were established as rather indiscriminate repositories of miscellaneous information. The growth was often an unplanned, mushroom development, and librarians were for the most part essentially ama- teur rather than professional workers. The collector-librarian was (and to some extent still is) in his heyday. Too fre- quently, little attention was paid to real needs , and even in college and univer- sity libraries quantities of books were gathered and housed with a cavalier disregard for the comfort, convenience, or requirements of those to be served. The number of titles steadily mounted, cataloging grew progressively more com- Roles in Higher Education I 91 plex and expensive, and the omnivo- rous collector-librarian was as happy as a miser who gathers unto himself a large hoard. American librarians are quite famil- iar with the assertion that if this tend- ency continues unchecked, university campuses will be as taken up with li- braries as the landscape of China is with cemeteries. Several decades ago some- body pointed out that the then current rate of growth of the Yale University library would in the year 2040 result in a book collection numbering over 200,- 000,000 volumes, occupying 6,000 1niles of shelves, and requiring 6,000 librar- ians merely to do the cataloging. The present-day librarian, as you know, is neither a mer e custodian of books nor an omnivorous collector of miscellaneous printed works. On the campus, he must and does work closely with subject-matter specialists in teach- ing and in research. If his library is modern and well-designed , it is a con- venient and inviting place for students as well as for more advanced scholars and researchers to work with and en- joy books. Moreover, the confines of the library contain not only books, man- uscripts , and periodicals, but also slides, films, recordings, various microforms, and the facilities for using them. With the growing emphasis on independent student learning, and the declining stress on classroom lecturing and text- book m emorization, the modern col- lege or university library is no less im- portant than the classroom and the lab- oratory as a place where learning is dis- seminated and advanced. All of these developments m ean, of course, that a new breed of librarian is emerging to meet changed and more complex demands for services. In addi- tion to being able to communicate effec- tively with advanced scholars and b egin- ning undergraduates , h e and his col- leagues in the library must know a great deal about data processing technology. 98 I College & Research Libraries • March 1970 Not only must he be able to analyze and manage the knowledge system over which he presides, but also he must be able to relate it effectively to na- tional and even international networks of information. This international conference in Tokyo signifies very concretely the widened ho- rizons of library leaders and their en- larged roles in contemporary society. As you look to one another for new and better ideas about how to conduct your increasingly complex enterprises, I would emphasize that institutions of higher education throughout the civil- ized world also look to you for ways to enhance teaching, learning, and research. In an era of strident mass communi- cation, it seems to me that librarians and other educators have a particular obligation to promote the wider and better use of one of man's greatest in- ventions , the book. I do not minimize the importance of other communications devices, including the latest gadgets of the new learning technology, but their spectacular features are likely to cause us-indeed are causing us-to overlook many of the advantages residing in the book as a superb device for human com- munication and understanding. Because of the time-honored relation- ship between books and learning, we need to remind ourselves that the rela- tionship is still viable. The world about us has grown so complex and the ac- cumulated knowledge about it so vast, and often abstract, that book learning and its practitioners are essential ele- ments to social survival. What other de- vices enable a wide range of thinkers of the past and the present to speak to us so readily? Despite progress in mak- ing mechanical communications devices inexpensive and portable, I still know of none that can be purchased in paper covers for less than a dollar, borrowed without cost from a library, carried in one's pocket, used anywhere without plugging in, and then be placed back on a shelf to be always ready for later use. Great teachers are not always ac- cessible in person, but the wisdom of all the ages, including our own, is dis- tilled for us on every conceivable sub- ject in book form. No admission is charged for those who wish to read for enjoyment, and no station interruptions puff the virtues of cosmetics, breakfast foods, or cigarettes. Moreover, the read- er as learner can set his own pace, and as enjoyer does not have to fit his taste to that of thousands or millions of other people. Many years ago, Francis Bacon noted that reading makes the full man. Li- brarians and other educators need to join efforts everywhere, it seems to me, in doing all in their power to further the use of that familiar but often neg- lected object, the book. For those who want knowledge or inspiration, there is no handier place to get it. For the wor- ried or weary, there is no better tran- quilizer. For the bored or the adven- turous, there is no easier mode of flight to other times and places. For those who want to promote a better understanding of other cultures, readily available books in translation afford inexpensive means of bringing diverse peoples into closer association with one another's ideas and aspirations. In colleges and universities, especial- ly, the library constitutes the keystone of teaching and learning. Paul Buck, Harvard historian and librarian, once noted that "a quality education is im- possible without a ·quality library," and compared "the student in many college courses to a traveler abroad who keeps his nose in the guidebook and never looks at the life around him. Teaching with textbooks means offering the stu- dent body only a guidebook instead of the variations and depth of experience to be found in living books." His book, Libraries and Universities, also notes that in the United States a superior library is an important element in attracting a superior faculty to an in- stitution of higher education. Although many American collegiate libraries fall below the standards set by Dr. Buck, I certainly agree with him that "the li- brary is the heart of education." In an era when students in many countries, including Japan and the United States, are protesting the kind of classroom in- struction they are getting, I wonder why more of them do not spend more time in the library freely pursuing their own intellectual interests and less time milling about on the campus demand- ing pedagogical reforms. Some of their professors may indeed be stodgy and limited in their points of view, but there is nothing limited about the range of ideas or perspectives to be had in a well-stocked library. Nowhere else on the campus-or away from it, for that matter-is there more freedom to run the whole gamut of what men of all times and places have thought and said. Furthermore, a good library can never be accused of spoon-feeding those who use it. The student who can use the li- brary as an intellectual resource is not a passive recipient of information and ideas obtained from lectures and text- books. By searching out the answers to his own questions, he engages actively in self-education. A common task of teachers and librarians, therefore, is to stir the curiosity of young people and to show them how to satisfy that curiosity. In short, I believe that student activists who really want to change the world would be well-advised to "invade" the library instead of the office of the presi- dent. I am not familiar with practices in Japan, but in the United States a good many colleges and universities do make an honest effort to acquaint beginning students with the rudimentary uses of Roles in Higher Education I 99 the library. Freshmen orientation week often includes a tour of the library, with some instruction about how books are classified and shelved, what the rules and regulations are for borrowing and returning books, where different kinds of materials may be found, and so on. Further instruction may be given dur- ing the opening semester as part of one or more courses of study, such as the in- troductory course in English. A nation- al survey published a few months ago indicated that such teaching is increas- ingly common, although American li- brarians agree that more is needed. The growing vogue among many American colleges and universities for independent study for advanced stu- dents has given rise to programs that may require few, if any, regular class meetings. The student has periodic con- ferences with his professor-in effect, he teaches himself. In the humanities and social sciences, his most important aid to learning necessarily is the library. Independent study, to be sure, cannot be recommended as superior to all oth- er modes of learning. It can, however, as one critique has mentioned, have a "liberating effect on the student, who becomes freer to exercise his choice of discrimination, and on the instructor, who becomes less involved in the pur- veyance of information and more con- cerned with the development of curi- osity and judgment." To make libraries more physically and intellectually inviting to their under- graduates, some of our most compre- hensive universities have established sep- arate buildings for them. There, the bookshelves are typically open to brows- ers, and reading rooms are often fur- nished with comfortable chairs and even ash trays for those who wish to smoke. For example, the Harvard University library, with its 8,000,000 or so volumes, has adjacent to its large main building a much smaller one for undergraduates, 100 I College & Research Libraries • March 1970 with only 150,000 volumes , all readily accessible. The University of Michigan has twelve residence hall libraries, the largest offering approximately 2,500 books, 1,100' phonograph records, and 70 periodicals and newspapers. When I was at the University of Texas , we followed the Harvard example and built a library primarily for undergraduates next to the much larger main libra1y. The response of students to our emphasis on "access and exposure," I might add, was most gratifying. At a time when higher education in most countries is beset with the twin problems of growing numbers of "con- sumers" and soaring costs, perhaps we can find solutions through a better uti- lization of our libraries. In my country, more and more institutions are willing to grant credits to students who can pass examinations covering the subject mat- ter of scheduled courses in which they have not been registered. It is also be- coming increasingly common to give advanced standing by examination- that is, to allow a student to take a se- quential course on a higher level than that to which his completed course work would entitle him. I suggest also that colleges and universities should give more attention to the continuing educa- tion of mature persons who may not be formally classified as students. They too require aid in the process of self-edu- cation and in the use of libraries as in- dispensable adjuncts to the achievement of learning. As you well know, the quality of li- brary holdings does relate to the quality of formal education. To identify quality in advanced education and to find out what factors are associated with it, the American Council on Education made a comparative study several years ago of graduate departments in twenty-nine academic disciplines among the 106 American universities offering appreci- able work on the doctoral level. In com- menting on the relation between aca- demic quality and library resources, Allan M. Cartter, the author, noted: The library is the heart of the univer- sity; no other single nonhuman factor is as closely related to the quality of gradu- ate education. A few universities with poor library resources have achieved con- siderable strength in several departments , in some cases because laboratory facili- ties may be more important in a par- ticular field than the library, and in other cases because the universities are located close to other great library collections such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. But institutions that are strong in all areas invariably have major national libraries. The seventeen universities among the first twenty insti- tutions in our study (omitting the three leading institutions of science or tech- nology) had total library holdings ranging from 1.3 million to nearly 8 million vol- umes; the average holding was 2.7 mil- lion volumes. The bottom twenty institu- tions among the 106 in the survey had li- braries ranging from 125,000 to one mil- lion volumes, averaging 465,000. The monograph, entitled An Assess- ment of Quality in Graduate Education, goes on to point out that the size of a library does not necessarily measure its adequacy for scholarly purposes. Dur- ing the study, an index was devised, ac- cordingly, for total volumes, for volumes added, for periodicals, and for an over- all library indicator. In the computation, the figure 1.00 was chosen to indicate the average number of volumes or pe- riodicals for all universities in the sur- vey. When this base figure was applied in each of the four comparisons, Har- vard was found to have a higher index standing than any other American uni- versity, except on the periodicals index, where it was exceeded by the University of California at Berkeley. The other top-ranking university li- braries in the United States, in respec- tive order, were at Yale, the University of California at Los Angeles, Cornell, Illinois, Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, and Chicago. The next nine, listed al- phabetically, were those at Johns Hop- kins, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. The overall library resources index for the first group of institutions ranged from 2.44 to 5.29, and for the latter group from 1.50 to 1.99. This study observed that all univer- sities having overall faculty ratings of "strong" or "distinguished" also had li- brary resources scores above 1.4. Over- all, library resources hold somewhat lesser importance to such specialized and distinguished institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technol- ogy. Even in these instances, however, a significant relationship maintains be- tween the strength of the library and the academic standing of the institution. Turning now from the academic scene to a broader consideration of what might be called "the power of books," I want to relate library resources more broadly to national resources. As a strong be- liever in the generally beneficial influ- ence of books on human beings, I am somewhat dismayed to acknowledge for my own country the inordinate amount of time people of virtually all age groups spend watching television. In reading recently about Japan, I noted that there also more than 80 percent of the households own television sets, and that the per capita ownership of books is low. In these respects the masses of our people in both nations apparently make somewhat similar use of their lei- sure time. I found encouragement elsewhere, however, in learning that both of our nations rank among the leading five publishing countries of the world. As an American with a warm feeling of friend- liness toward Japan, I was pleased to observe that that nation imports more books from the United States than from any other country. Unfortunately for Roles in Higher Education I 101 us Americans, there are more Japanese who read English than persons in my country who read Japanese, and thus the flow of books is not equal in both directions; I can assure you, though, that our interest in your people and your culture is growing continuously. To my way of thinking, the interchange of books and ideas, of scholars and stu- dents, is even more important than di- plomacy in the furtherance of interna- tional understanding and world peace. Librarians no less than diplomats need to communicate with one another, and in so doing everyone benefits. Furthermore, I think it could be dem- onstrated that there is a fairly close rela- tionship between the prosperity and strength of a nation and the values it at- taches to the kinds of knowledge found in libraries. The recent Report of the President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, commenting on some find- ings by an American scholar, Derek Price, notes: In a series of penetrating studies, he has been able to show that the contribu- tion of the various nations of the globe to the world's store of scientific information per se, as measured by the share of the world's scientific papers in various fields annually issuing from them, is remark- ably coordinate, not with their total pop- ulations, not with their own estimates of the funds which their governments expend in research and development-which may vary from less than 1 percent of their an- nual budgets to the high of approxi- mately 3.5 percent of the gross national product reckoned for our own country -but, remarkably enough, with their overall national wealth. That proportion turns out to be extraordinarily uniform among all nations which are making sig- nificant contributions to the global ac- cumulation of scientfic knowledge. In the unremitting competition of our planet, it is crystal clear that any nation which permits its scientific resources to wither, or even to diminish, over any con- siderable period of time is ipso facto gravely compromising its position in the 102 I College & Research Libraries • March 1970 world. And the greatest of these resources, of course, is the human one. . . . This citation speaks only of scientific knowledge and resources, of course, but I suspect that a comparable inquiry into library resources and their utilization would yield similar findings and conclu- sions. Japan and the United States are both prosperous, strong nations.' To main- tain our prosperity and strength, how- ever, both nations must be willing to ensure adequate support for our librar- ies and our educational institutions. We librarians and educators therefore have an obligation not only to render the best services we can but also to im- press upon our constituents the indis- pensability of sufficient material support and public understanding for a continu- ous enlargement and improvement of these services. In closing, let n1e say that mankind owes a debt of gratitude to libraries and librarians for services to the ad vance- ment of higher learning and of civiliza- tion. Although libraries already are esti- mable social agencies, the presence at this conference of leading Japanese and American librarians signifies a desire to improve further their efficiency and ef- fectiveness. I would remind you that the effort to enhance the increase of knowl- edge and its better utilization not only strengthens nations, but also promotes the rule of reason and mutual under- standing throughout the world. Far from being mere custodians of accumulated knowledge, you play vital roles in raising the quality of human life. I commend those who were responsible for organiz- ing this conference, and wish all of you every success in carrying forward its implications. ••