College and Research Libraries


KEYES D. METCALF 

Six Influential Academic and 

Research Librarians 

IT HAS BEEN DIFFICULT to select a half 
dozen persons as subjects for this arti-
cle, because I have known or known 
about so many important librarians dur-
ing my library career, which began in 
1902. I find on checking that I have met 
seventy-nine of the ninety presidents of 
the ALA in the past 100 years and had 
indirect connection with three of the 
other eleven. I shall simplify the ar-
rangement of my story by dealing with 
the individuals concerned in order of 
their birth dates. I never met two of the 
men included here; they died before my 
library career commenced, though after 
I was born. With each of the four oth-
ers I had professional dealings and 
friendly associations for an average of 
over forty years. 

WILLIAM FREDERICK PooLE 

William Frederick Poole was the sec-
ond president of the American Library 
Association. His term began in 1885, 
and he was reelected the following year, 
making him one of the four men who 
have held that office for more than a. 
one-year term. The others were his prede-
cessor, Justin Winsor, Melvil Dewey, 
and Herbert Putnam. It had been hoped 
that the 1853 Library Conference, at 
which Mr. Poole had an important part, 
would be the first of a series of annual 
occurrences. But, because of a series of 
mishaps, the next meeting did not come 
until the 1876 conference. Poole had 

332 I 

William Frederick Poole 

the distinction of being the only librari-
an who had an important p;1rt in both 
of these meetings. He was born in De-
cember 1821, one month before my fa-
ther's birth. Lack of funds delayed his 
graduation from Yale until 1849. While 
going to college, he served as librarian 
of the Brothers in Unity Society Li-
brary, and by the time he graduated he 
had already published Poole's Index, a 
deservedly famous reference work 
which, in its later editions, is still in use. 



.~ 

After Poole's death, in 1894, his index 
was continued for some seventeen years, 
in one form or another, edited by Wil-
liam I. Fletcher, one of Dewey's suc-
cessors at Amherst, on a partially coop-
erative basis. It was then found that it 
could no longer compete with H. W. 
Wilson's Readers' Guide. My library sis-
ter, Antoinnette Metcalf, prepared the 
index for the Harper's Monthly during 
the last of these years. 

Soon after I took charge of the stacks 
in the New York Public Library in 1913, 
I was asked by Harry Miller Lydenberg 
to go down to the New York Mercantile 
Library and arrange to bring back with 
me that library's gift of a large quanti-
ty of volumes. The library had stored 
them, because of lack of space, on the 
tops of bookcases in great piles three 
feet high. Over them I found about an 
inch of dust so I bought a pair of over-
alls before I brought them down from 
their perches. Among them were many, 
comparatively scarce, bound volumes in-
dexed in Poole, that the New York Pub-
lic Library did not have. Most of these 
were published before the Astor Li-
brary was founded in the middle of the 
last century. In checking, I found that 
the New York Public Library had 
lacked, surprisingly, well over 1,100 vol-
umes that were indexed in Poole, and 
several hundred of these were among 
the Mercantile Library's discards. 

I immediately decided to take on as 
a special project an attempt to complete 
the library's collection of Poole sets and 
began to check the current second-hand 
book catalogs and continued this as 
what might be called my ijrst "research 
project," until I left the library in 1937. 
By this time the missing volumes had 
been reduced to well under fifty. In the 
meantime a second large windfall had 
come with volumes transferred to the 
New York Public Library from the New 
York Society Library, which was found-
ed in the 1750s and was the third oldest 
surviving proprietary library in the 

Tnfiuential Librarians I 333 

country. Again we found hundreds of 
volumes indexed in Poole not yet in the 
New York Public Library. 

My other special interest in Mr. Poole 
comes from the fact that he was ·the 
first, and, to all intents and purposes, 
the only librarian in his day who pur-
sued a special interest in library build-
ing planning and had an important in-
fluence in that field. He might well be 
regarded as our first library building 
planning consultant. During the last 
forty-five years I have been one of his 
numerous successors, a group which in-
cludes James Thayer Gerould, Joseph 
Wheeler, Ralph Ellsworth, Ellsworth 
Mason, Hoyt Galvin, Ralph Ulveling, 
and Charles Mohrhardt. 

Mr. Poole was librarian of the Bos-
ton Athenaeum from 1856 to 1869, and 
my wife, Elinor Gregory Metcalf, was 
his fourth successor in this position. In 
spite of never having met Mr. Poole, I 
have a feeling that I knew him. Mr. 
Poole's life has been written by William 
L. Williamson, in his William Frederick 
Poole and the Modern Library Move-
ment.1 

JusTIN WINSOR 

Justin Winsor was born in 1831 and 
became a librarian by an unusual route. 
In 1866 he was appointed a trustee of 
the Boston Public Library, and he be-
came the librarian, or superintendent 
as he was called, only two years later as 
a result of a report on the library which 
he had written. This report pleased the 
other trustees so much that they offered 
him the position, succeeding Charles 
Coffin Jewett. (Jewett had been the first 
librarian of the Smithsonian Institution 
and the first advocate of cooperative 
cataloging who did anything about it; 
it was he who was more responsible than 
anyone else for the 1853 Library Con-
ference.) 

Nine years later, in the autumn of 
1877, after several disagreements, to put 
it mildly, with the city authorities and 
his trustees, Mr. Winsor moved to Har-



334 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

vard. He had turned down that assign-
ment earlier after tentatively accepting 
it. When the city authorities made trou-
ble for him again, he reversed himself 
once more and became the librarian of 
Harvard College. I have been told that 
Mr. Winsor reported his final accept-
ance at Harvard only a few hours be-
fore Melvil Dewey ( Melvil Dui if you 
prefer it that way, as he sometimes did) 
arrived in Cambridge at President 
Eliot's request, prepared to accept the 
position that Winsor had just taken. 
Winsor was the first president of the 
American Library Association. He 
served in that position for nine consecu-
tive terms and was elected again in 1897, 
so that he could represent the Amer-
ican Library Association at the Second 
International Library Conference in 
London later that year, shortly before 
his death. 

I have chosen Winsor to write about 
for several personal reasons. First, Mr. 
Winsor was my fourth predecessor at 
Harvard College, just as Poole was 
Elinor's fourth predecessor at the Bos-
ton Athenaeum. 

Second, his only daughter was a very 
close friend of my wife's mother, and 
his granddaughter is a good friend of 
the Harvard and Radcliffe libraries as 
well as of my own family. 

Third, I sat during my eighteen years 
at Harvard at the very unusual desk that 
Mr. Winsor purchased for his own use 
in 1877 when he first came to Harvard. 
It was so large that it had ample knee-
holes on all four sides, to say nothing 
of four sliding shelves over its four 
sets of drawers. On the under side of 
one of the sliding shelves I found a no-
tation in Mr. Winsor's handwriting 
reading, "Purchased in November, 1877, 

The Office of Justin Winsor 
Harvard University Archives 



Harvard University Archives 

Justin Winsor 

Justin Winsor." The desk is still in use 
by one of my successors, Louis Martin. 
Mr. Winsor had a superstructure built 
over the desk to hold maps, in which he 
was greatly interested, but this had dis-
appeared before my time. 

Fourth, the Harvard Library's finan-
cial officer when I came to Harvard in 
1937, Mr. Gookin by name, had worked 
for Mr. Winsor as a young man, typing 
letters for him on the first typewriter 
that the library owned; it was purchased 
especially for Mr. Gookin, who was al-
ways glad to talk to me about Mr. Win-
sor. 

Fifth, I kept near my desk Mr. Win-
sor's handwritten order book of instruc-
tions to the staff. It said among many 
other things that staff .members must be 
sure not to use the library telephone 
(note: not telephones) for persoJ?,al 
calls, and other strict rules which were 
pertinent in the nineteenth century, but 
many of which seem completely out-
dated or perhaps absurd today. 

Mr. Winsor was a historian of note 

Influential Librarians I 335 

and perhaps the leading cartographer 
of his time. His writings on Boston and 
on American history are still important 
and useful. In one way he might be 
called very much up to date because he 
taught a course in the field of geogra-
phy but refused to give marks to the 
students at the end of the term. Finally, 
as a result of this, President Eliot told 
him that he could no longer teach the 
course. A biography of Mr. Winsor by 
Joseph Alfred Borome goes into his ca-
reer in detail. 2 

HERBERT PuTNAM 

Herbert Putnam, who is remembered 
primarily as the Librarian of Congress 

.for the forty years from 1899 to 1939, 

Library of Congress 

Herbert Putnam 



336 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

was born in 1861. He was a Harvard 
graduate, a member of the Putnam pub-
lishing family, and trained as a lawyer. 
But before admission to the bar, he be-
came the librarian of the Minneapolis 
Athenaeum and later of the Public Li-
brary in the same city. He then prac-
ticed law briefly in Boston, before be-
coming the librarian of the Boston Pub-
lic Library, which was in somewhat of 
a crisis in 1895 while its great McKim, 
Mead and White library building was 
under construction. Not long after this, 
when the appointment of a new Li-
brarian of Congress was under consid-
eration, Herbert Putn.am was a repre-
sentative of the American Library As-
sociation at the congressional hearing. 
He made such an impressive presenta-
tion that three years later, when the po-
sition was again open due to the death 
of John Russell Young (who was a 
journalist, not a librarian), President 
McKinley appointed Putnam to the 
post. He finally retired in 1939, after 
forty years of service but continued for 
many more years to go into an office as.,.. 
signed to him in the library. He livecf 
until he was ninety-four in 1955. 

I first met Mr. Putnam in the fall of 
1911 when Mary Wright Plummer, the 
principal of the Library School of the 
New York Public Library, arranged to 
have him speak to the school's first class, 
of which I was a member. During the 
Christmas holidays in 1913, I visited the 
Library of Congress for the first time 
in order to fulfill one of the require-
ments for the diploma of the library 
school. I was a shy young man, and I 
was alone, not having come with the 
others in the class, which was made up 
largely of girls. I did not dare to ask to 
see Mr. Putnam, but while looking 
around the reading room, I saw him 
proceeding briskly past the round circu-
lation desk, walking very straight as he 
always did and, I am sure, trying to con-
ceal the embarrassing fact that one of 
his garters was dragging along behind 

him, still attached to a sock that had 
fallen down to his shoe-top. 

Although I saw him at American Li-
brary Association meetings several times 
after 1913, it was not until seventeen 
years later, in 1930, that I had my first 
opportunity to talk with him. In con-
nection with my work as chairman of 
the American Library Association co-
operative cataloging committee for a 
half a dozen years, beginning in 1930, 
I spent approximately one day a month 
at the Library of Congress with Wini-
fred Gregory, who was in charge of the 
committee's work. On arriving at the Li-
brary of Congress on the night train 
from New York, I was generally waiting 
.at the door to enter the library when it 
was opened. I always went directly to 
Mr. Putnam's office to make a courtesy 
call as I did riot think it proper to be 
talking with members of his staff on li-
brary problems without his knowledge. 
He was always .at his desk. He customari-
ly arrived in his office between 7: 00 and 
7:30a.m., long before opening time. He 
always greeted me cordially. Sometimes 
he asked me to lunch with him at noon 
in the library cafeteria which was then 
in the library tower. He often invited 
me to go around the library with him 
on one of his regular d.aily tours 
through it, and as we walked he would 
talk with me about the problems he 
faced in the library. 

Cooperative cataloging work started 
to go very well, increasing the number 
of Library of Congress printed cards 
considerably. In due course it was 
found that the library's catalogers were 
unwilling to accept the copy for the 
cards that came in from the cooperating 
libraries. They held them up and re-
vised them, thus delaying their publica-
tion as well as adding to the cost of the 
whole procedure. Mr. Hastings, Miss 
Gregory, and I were all concerned. Fi-
nally I spoke strongly tp Mr. Putnam. 
In his younger days he had been a very 
able administrator and judge of the 

I 

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ability of librarians and had built up 
a superb staff between 1900 and 1920. 
But by 1930 he had lost contact with the 
younger members of the profession. 
The quality of the staff had deteriorat-
ed as a result of his shyness and aloof-
ness-as well as from poor salaries and 
poor selection. Mr. Putnam _said he 
would do something about the head of 
the catalog department so as to improve 
the situation we had talked about. The 
next morning he made . what proved to 
be a poor appointment. The individual 
was a very capable man who had good 
ideas, but he was completely unable to 
put them into effect with a group of 
"perfectionist" catalogers. (I have al-
ways felt somewhat responsible for that 
appointment. ) As a result, the situation 
did not improve, and the American Li-
brary Association committee agreed that 
there was nothing to do but wait for 
Mr. Putnam's retirement, keeping the 
project alive even if it were less suc-
cessful than had been hoped. 

I hesitated to write the foregoing 
paragraph because Dr. Putnam, like the 
two men of whom I have written earlier 
in this article, and the three who fol-
low, were among our greatest librarians. 
Indeed, these six men did more, per-
haps, than any others to bring American 
libraries to the stage they had reached 
by 1940 ( Melvil Dewey and John Shaw 
Billings might be added to the list) . I 
met Melvil Dewey on three occasions 
but never felt acquainted with him; I 
<lid know his son, Godfrey, who was a 
good deal of a "chip off the old block/' 
and I had dealings with him in connec-
tion with the great shorthand collection 
in the New York Public Library. 

EDWIN HATFIELD ANDERSON 

Edwin Hatfield Anderson was born 
in 1861, just six days after Herbert Put-
nam, in the little town of Zionsville in 
central . Indiana. He graduated in 1883 
from Wabash College and received his 
M.A. three years later. I never knew what 

Influential Librarians I 337 

New York Public Library 

Edwin Hatfield Anderson 

he did in the years that followed until he 
went to Melvil Dewey's library school 
at the New York State Library in the au-
tumn of 1889. William F. Poole offered 
him the position of cataloger in the 
newly opened Newberry Library in Chi-
cago before he graduated, and he gave 
up the Library School and spent a year 
at the Newberry. He then organized the 
Carnegie Free Library of Braddock, 
Pennsylvania, and served as its librarian 
for three years. This was followed by 
ten years in a similar position at the 
Carnegie Library at Pittsburgh, where 
he became well known. His work in 
book selection was noteworthy, the li-
brary's book form catalog was remark-
able, and he built up the strongest staff 
to be found in any large public library. 
After a year in other work, he served 
for two and a half years as successor to 
Melvil Dewey at the New York State Li-
brary and Library School following 
Dewey's discharge from that position. 
During these thirty months he strength-
ened the library and the school and add-



338 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

ed James I. Wyer, Frank K. Walter, and 
Frank Tolman to the staff. He then 
went to the New York Public Library 
as assistant director under Dr. Billings 
on June 1, 1908. 

Dr. Billings died in April 1913. Mr. 
Anderson's appointment as director in 
place of Dr. Billings took place in May. 
He had two years earlier found finan-
cial support from Mr. Carnegie for a 
library school at the library and I be-
came a member of its first class in Sep-
tember 1911. 

Early in 1912 Azariah Root, who was 
to be absent on a sabbatical, asked me 
to take charge of his office in the Ober-

. lin College Library. Mr. Anderson tried 
to discourage me from accepting the po-
sition, saying that I would find the col-
lege students immature and boring. But 
I went anyway, fearing that as a result 
he would hold it against me on my re-
turn in January 1913 to finish the school 
year. This proved to be an erroneous as-
sumption, and in the spring Mr. Ander-
son appointed me chief of stacks in the 
New York Public Library. 

But my close connection with Mr. An-
derson did not come until six years later 
in 1918 when, in addition to my stack 
work, I was asked to take over the ad-
ministration of the economics and docu-
ments division following the departure 
of Adelaide Hasse from the library and 
until her permanent successor became 
available. 

I saw a good deal of Mr. Anderson 
during the next six weeks. He had· a bad 
lumbago attack and was quite provoked 
on one occasion when he could not 
reach me in either of my positions with-
in a few minutes. This was one of the 
few times while I was working with him 
that he showed any sign of irritation 
with me. 

I was asked by EHA (as we called 
him) to come into his outer office on 
January 1, 1919, as executive assistant. 
My only directions were to make myself 
useful to him and Mr. Lydenberg, the 

chief reference librarian. I soon found 
that my duties included those of person-
nel officer. Mr. Anderson also asked me 
to prepare the budget for the reference 
department, suggesting salary changes 
and drafting the budget letter. I spent 
on the average at least an hour a day in 
his office during the next sixteen years 
and soon discovered the source of his 
greatest service to his profession-his 
insistence that improving the quality of 
the staff was the most important thing 
a librarian can do. 

Comparatively few people remember 
Edwin Hatfield Anderson today, but he 
did more than anyone else in his time 
to improve the quality of library per-
sonnel, and clearly he was one of our 
most important and influential librari-
ans. Twenty-four ALA presidents in the 
fifty years between 1910 and 1960 had 
worked closely with him or under his di-
rection. EHA was very helpful to me 
personally. I have always had difficulty 
in finding the right word in talking and 
in writing-! was extremely lefthanded 
and was ·made to write with my right 
hand in the fifth grade. Mr. Anderson 
often asked me to draft important let-
ters for him, and perhaps because he 
had had difficulty himself in writing, he 
recognized my situation and helped me 
to become a better if not a good writer. 
I well remember the first time when fi-
nally after years of effort I prepared a 
budget letter for him in which he did 
not change a single word. 

EHA was not a· tall man but always 
stood very erect and seemed taller than 
he was. He was handsome, with a fine, 
strong face. But in spite of my close 
contact with him, I never felt that we 
were personal friends. A close friend 
of mine, Paul North Rice, who had 
comparatively little to do yvith him pro-
fessionally, however, talked with him 
casually much more easily -than I could. 

After Mr. Anderson retired in 1934, 
I saw him only once. We happened to 
be in the Williamsburg Inn in Virginia 



at the same time. We met in the lobby 
and had our last talk. He still walked as 
straight .as ever but was noticeably frail-
er. He died only a few years later at the 
age of eighty-four. -

HARRY MILLER LYDENBERG 

Harry Miller Lydenberg was born in 
Dayton, Ohio, in November 1874. He 
was still young when his father died as 
a result of a Civil War wound. His boy-
hood gang had fights with the gang to 
which Orville and Wilbur Wright be-
longed. Harry delivered newspapers win-
ter mornings while the stars were still 
shining and would speak of it with 
pleasure forty years later when I used 
to drive him to the Catskills before day-
light for a weekend of hiking. He 
worked in the Dayton Public Library 
through his high school days and then 
graduated from Harvard in three years, 
in spite of working long hours under 
Justin Winsor in the library. He did so 
well that Mr. Winsor wanted to keep 
him. But he shifted to · the newly con-
solidated New York Public Library un-
der John Shaw Billings, believing that 
it would be a better preparation for his 
life work. 

Dr. Billings recognized his ability and 
saw to it that he had a great variety of 
experience in various parts of the li-
brary, including work with Wilberforce 
Eames, the great bibliographer. He soon 
made Mr. Lydenberg his personal as-
sistant, and in that position Harry 
~elped to develop the library's new clas-
sification and its subject heading list, 
edited its bulletin, and took a leading 
part in book selection and in the index-
ing of periodicals not included in stan-
dard periodical indexes. He was very 
much involved in the preparation · for 
and the carrying out of the complicated 
move from the Astor and Lenox library 
buildings into the building built by the 
city for the private institution at Forty-
second Street and Fifth A venue. Before 
the move in 1911, he became chief ref-

Influential Librarians I 339 

erence librarian and the head of the 
reference department. Its research col-
lection was one of the three finest in the 
country then as it is today, sixty-five 
years later. · ( The two others are those 
of the Library of Congress and Har-
vard.) 

I first met HML ( as we called him be-
hind his back and as he signed his notes 
to us) soon after I entered the New 
York Public Library School in Septem-
ber 1911. He was slender, rather short, 
.and wiry and energetic physically; he al-
ways climbed stairs two or three at a 
time. It seemed to me that he was a little 
gruff in his manner, but there was a 
warmth close to the surface. I went to 
work indirectly under him while still in 
library school early in 1913, and in July 
of that year, as chief of stacks, I came 
into regular contact with him. At first 
he seemed cold and unsympathetic when 
I appealed to him about proble~s that 

New York Public Library 

H ar,Y Miller Lydenberg 



340 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

I and others were facing. I am sure that 
he thought I was what we would call to-
day an "activist," although I do not be-
lieve that I was inclined to be a trouble-
maker. B.;t within a year, I came to un-
derstand that his gruffness was only a 
thin veneer covering one of the warmest 
and most likable and friendly persons 
I have ever known. 

When I first became well acquainted 
with Mr. Lydenberg in 1913, I thought 
he was the most conservative and inflex-
ible man I had ever met. By the time I 
moved into the main office of the li-
brary in 1919, as his executive assistant 
with contact many times a day, I began 
to realize that he was not so conserva-
tive that he would not listen to the oth-
er side of questions on which we dis- . 
agreed. In another ten years we had be-
come close friends, and he seemed "mid-
dle of the road," and in the 1930s I re-
alized that he was becoming more liber-
al every year. Few of us in any profes-
sion as we grow older b~come less con-
servative as he did. This flexibility in 
the other direction was combined with 
tremendous ability in many fields of li-
brary work. I am ready to say without 
hesitation that in 1940 he stood at the 
top of the library profession. In his 
sixty years of active library service from 
1890 to 1950, he was, all things consid-
ered, our greatest librarian. 

But now I should explain the reasons 
for this conclusion. 

( 1 ) If you take the long -term view, 
success in book selection and building 
up collections are the most important 
parts of a librarian's task. In the more 
than forty years during which he was 
directly responsible or had close over-
sight over this phase of the NYPL' s 
work, HML built up the collections in 
the fields that the library covered more 
successfully than any librarian in the 
United States and probably in the 
world. This fact is shown very clearly 
by the results of a study made by Pro-
fessors Douglas Waples and Harold D. 

Lasswell of the University of Chicago, 
who reported in National Libraries and 
Foreign Scholarship that after cons.ult-
ing with top scholars in the field~ of the 
social sciences broadly interpreted in 
France, Germany, and England, they 
had prepared lists of some 600 of the 
most important books and journals pub-
lished in these fields in the years 1927-
33. These were checked by the Library 
of Congress, Harvard, the New York 
Public Library, the University of Chi-
cago, the University of Michigan, and 
the University of California at Berke-
ley, each of which was covering the 
fields included. The western university 
libraries had 30 to 50 percent of the 
books; Harvard and the Library of 
Congress had 60 to 62 percent. Despite 
the fact that the New York Public Li-
brary book funds were smaller than 
those of the five other libraries, it had 
92 percent, except for law which it did 
not attempt to cover because the Bar As-
sociation Library was only two blocks 
away. 3 

( 2) While he was .less interested than 
some librarians in administration pure 
and simple, that is, making the "wheels 
go around smoothly," he realized the im- ' 
portance of understanding persons and 
their abilities. While willing to give up 
detailed administration to others, HML 
saw to it that he was surrounded by able 
administrators and that their duties 
were carried out successfully. He retired 
before he needed to so as to avoid ad-
ministrative crises which he saw coming; 
he preferred to leave these to others, 
who could deal with them as well as he 
could, while he went on to different and 
important work elsewhere. 

( 3) Although he suffered from color 
blindness, HML was interested in color 
and in good printing and with the able 
help of John Archer, the chief of his 
library's printing office, its printing was 
outstanding and a large number of its 
publications were chosen among the 
Graphic Arts Fifty Books of the Year. 

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( 4) Mr. Lyden berg saw to it that the 
library did more with new photographic 
methods of reproduction and with the 
preservation of paper and leather than 
any other institution. In 1912 he pur-
chased what I believe to have been the 
first photostat machine in a library, and 
its use by the library and its readers 
grew by leaps and bounds. By 1937 it 
was doing a quarter of a million dol-
lars a year in business. 

In 1914 the library, which had been 
without a shelflist, made one by copy-
ing the cards required from the public 
catalog onto a specially designed photo-
stat paper stock, fifteen years before 
Yale undertook a similar, more widely 
advertised project. During the ·world 
War I years, Mr. Lydenberg made over 
twenty studies of methods of preserving 
paper stock that was deteriorating in a 
frightening manner, finally deciding to 
paste thin Japanese rice paper o~ both 
sides of each sheet of New York news-
papers, which lengthened their life 
some twenty years; but then, alas, it gave 
out. He studied the life and strength of 
modern leather and buckram bindings, 
finding that most American leather was 
improperly tanned. As a result it grad-
ually flaked badly. He obtained first-
class leather for use by his library, par-
ticularly for heavily used reference 
books. Grease from hands kept it . in 
good shape, and it was strong enough to 
prevent broken bindings. 

In the early 1930s microphotography 
for libraries came into use for the first 
time. (The Library of Congress had 
copied American Archives before that 
for later enlargement for use.) He ob-
tained a foundation grant for studying 
the suitability of microfilm for refer-
ence books and found that it was not 
desirable for material where one' .must 
continually look back to ·the index for 
the particular reference wanted, as is 
the case in genealogies, dictionaries, en-
cyclopedias, etc. _ 

HML also encouraged me to . expert\ 

Influential Librarians I 341 

ment for the first time with reduced-
size offset, which resulted in a trial of 
reducing the New York Times to a page 
one-fourth the size of the original, 
printed on a better paper. This reduced 
the bulk so much that the value of the 
space used for files equalled the cost of 
the reproduction. Unfortunately, this 
took place during the depression, and 
not enough subscriptions could be ob-
tained to make it feasible. By the time 
the depression was over, use of micro-
film had become so common for news-
paper reproduction that it seemed un-
wise to make the change for the Times, 
which was the one paper in the U.S. for 
which it would have been feasible. 

But this experiment led directly to re-
duced-size offset reproductions and Al-
bert Boni's later success and that of oth-
ers in this field. These are simply sam-
ples of the problems in the use of new 
scientific methods. HML was a leader 
in this field-a conservative librarian 
had become the leading innovator in his 
time, along with Robert Binkley with 
whom he worked very closely in the field 
of the reproduction of research ma-
terials. 

( 5) Meanwhile, during this same 
period Mr. Lydenberg demonstrated his 
reference ability by pursuing to a ·suc-
cessful conclusion and putting into 
print solutions to previously unsolved 
reference questions such as the origin 
of much quoted sayings attributed to 
Abraham Lincoln. 

( 6) In all of these matters, HML was 
the driving figure but, in addition, he 
realized by 1930 that the time had come 
for him to take a leading part in the 
outside library world. He became the 
president of the American Library Asso-
ciation in the early 1930s at a critical 
time when the association was struggling 
to obtain federal aid for libraries. Af-
ter his retirement this was to grow into 
the great program supported by the gov-
ernment, particularly in the 1960s. 

(7) With the aid of William War-



342 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

ner Bishop, Andrew Keogh, C. C. Wil-
liamson, and James Thayer Gerould, he 
took the lead in bringing about the pub-
lication of the Library of Congress Cat-

.. alogs; the British Museum Catalogue; 
the first two editions of the Union List 
of Serials; as well as the cooperative cat-
aloging enterprise, started with the Li-
brary of Congress in 1930 but which did 
not come into full fruition until forty 
years later. 

( 8) After his retirement in 1941, at 
an age ,just under sixty-seven, instead of 
settling down for a well-earned period 
of reading and recreation in his beloved 
garden, he organized the first large in-
formation library in an underdeveloped 
country, the Benjamin Franklin Library 
in Mexico City. 

He presided over the ALA Interna-
tional Relations Committee Office in 
Washington during World War II, suc-
ceeding, with foundation aid, in collect-
ing important monographs and serials, 
to fill in or replace the volumes lacking 
in libraries of European countries be-
cause of the war. The U.S. Book Ex-
change later developed from this enter-
prise. And finally, he became the senior 
member. of the Library of Congress 
mission, which, in 1946, brought back 
from Europe over a million volumes 
for some sixty American libraries that 
had been unable to acquire them during 
the wartime period. 

As a result of this cooperative effort, 
it was made evident that the Farming-
ton Plan, which was then under consid-
eration, was practicable. 

Shortly thereafter the Midwest Inter-
Library Center was agreed upon, and a 
foundation was started for the literally 
hundreds of consortia which have 
grown up throughout the country, re-
sulting in library cooperation on a scale 
which many of us had looked forward 
to but had not succeeded in achieving. 
Ultimately, this will do more than any-
thing else, except the modern methods 
of automation, to bring our whole re-

search library enterprise in the country 
into one great unit hopefully without 
restricting the work of individual li-
braries. It should be remembered that 
Mr. Lydenberg had a large part in their 
origin and development. 

Many librarians had talked of the 
things that HML started, but no one 
had been able to get them started on the 
path which is still being extended so 
rapidly in tha 1970s. 

CHARLES CLARENCE WILLIAMSON 

Charles C. Williamson was born in 
January 1877, just a little over two years 
after Harry Lydenberg, but he did not 
begin library work until twenty-one 
years later than HML. He was a high 
school dropout who, after deciding not 
to be a farmhand, went to business 
school and, still unhappy, tried a year 
at Ohio Wesleyan University. Then, af-
ter two years of te~ching in the Salem, 
Ohio, public schools, he entered West-
em Reserve University and worked his 
way through in the registrar's office, 
where he met his future wife. He grad-
uated in 1904 at the age of twenty-sev-
en. This was followed by two years of 
graduate work in economics at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin and one at Colum-
bia, where he received his Ph.D. in 1907. 
He was immediately snatched up by 
M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn 
Mawr, who was remarkably successful 
in attracting brilliant young students to 
her college as associates, and for four 
years he taught economics and politics 
there. Mr. Anderson then selected him 
to organize and preside over the New 
York Public Library's newly established 
Division of Economics and Sociology 
when the library entered its new build-
ing in the spring of 1911. That autumn, 
as a member of the library's first library 
school class, I heard his lectures on the 
literature of his field, supplemented by 
a first-class bibliography of the basic 
books on the subject. Thereafter, I did 
practice work in his division, filing the 



cards in the catalogs which were being 
started (working with William Seaver, 
his first assistant and later M.I.T.'s li-
brarian) and was impressed by the pre-
ciseness with which the work was being 
carried on. 

Three years later, when the newly es-
tablished Municipal Reference Branch 
of the library was not going well, Wil-
liamson took it ·over and soon made it 
a success. In 1918 he shifted to the 
Carnegie Corporation as a statistician 
to carry out an Americanization study. 
But in the late fall of 1918 he was 
asked to return to the New York Public 
Library to take the place of Adelaide 
Hasse as chief of the economics and doc-
uments division, a position I had cov-
ered for six weeks until he could be 
freed. 

Dr. Williamson was able during the 
next few years to reorganize the some-
what demoralized staff of his division 
and to start the Public Affairs Informa-
·tion Service, which recorded and in-
dexed material on politics and govern-
ment, particularly pamphlets and other 
materials that do not fit into normal li-
brary collections of books and period-
icals. This has been one of the great 
reference sources in its field ever since. 
He also served as a member of a com-
mittee of which I was presiding officer 
and there devised the method of col-
lections of minor uncataloged pamph-
lets in bound volumes and providing 
one subject card but no author card for 
each. This collection has now grown to 
some 500,000 items, few of which have 
been collected in other libraries. After 
Dr. Williamson left the New York Pub-
lic Library for the last time, the P.A.I.S. 
was carried on with great success by 
Alice Jewitt, Rollin A. Sawyer, and in 
more recent years by John Fall; its use-
fulness has been maintained for more 
than fifty years. 

After leaving the reference depart-
ment, Dr. Williamson became the direc-
tor of the Information Service for the 

Influential Librarians I 343 

Columbia University 

Charles Clarence Williamson 

Rockefeller Foundation, where he re-
mained for a little over five years. One 
spring day in 1926 I was talking with 
Mr. Anderson in his office about staff 
problems when a telephone call came to 
him from Frank Tolman, the Exten-
sion Division chief of the New York 
State Library. I got up to leave, but 
EHA signaled to me to stay, and I lis-
tened in to hear arrangements made by 
which the New York State Library 
School at Albany and the New York 
Public Library Library School were to 
be combined and transferred to Colum-
bia University under the directorship of 
Dr. Williamson, who would become the 
director of the university library and 
dean ·of the Columbia School of Li-
brary Service. Dr. Williamson began his 
new assignment in May, taking over 
much of ·the staff of the two older li-
brary schools and reorganizing the uni-
versity library, which was not in the best 
of condition and needed a new library 
building badly. The School of Library 
Service made an excellent start with a 
first-class faculty. In the years that fol-
lowed, library education throughout the 



344 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 

country was to benefit from the exam-
ple of Columbia as well as from the 
recommendations made by Dr. William-
son in his Carnegie Corporation report 
entitled Training for Library Service. 4 

With the library school going smooth-
ly and with a top-level staff, Dr. Wil-
liamson went to work on plans for a 
new and much-needed main library 
building which would house the central 
library and also provide the best quar-
ters for a library school to be found 
anywhere in the cquntry at that time. 
By the end of the calendar year 1926 -he 
had worn himself out. His long-time 
Western Reserve University registrar 
friend ,' who was now at the University 
of North Carolina but who had a sum-
mer home in Woodland Valley in the 
Catskills, suggested a quiet guest house 
where in the winter he would be the 
only guest with a very fine family. 

For some six previous autumns, six li-
brarians who had been at the New York 
Public Library-Paul North Rice, Carl 
Cannon, Charles McCombs, Charles 1 
Williamson, Frank A. Waite, and I- -
had spent the nearest weekend to Co-
lumbus Day in the Catskills, enjoying 
the autumn color and climbing moun-
tains, stopping in various hotels in the 
area. As a result of Williamson's stay at 
Beechknoll, the group asked if they 
could come there each fall for their 
weekend walk. This_ was arranged and 
continued with the same group for 
forty .years; those of us who were able 
continued until 1972. Harry Lydenberg 
was added to the group in the late 
1920s, and Cannon dropped out after 
going to Yale. We naturally became very 
close friends. 

But to go back to 1927, Williamson 
returned to work after a few weeks, 
fully recovered. Knowing of my inter-
est in building planning, he often asked 
me to go over the plans with him, a pro-
cess which took several years. Just when 
working drawings were completed and 
ready for tenders, Harry Lydenberg, 

Frank Waite, Williamson, my son, and 
I went out for a spring walk up to the 
Farnsworth Park on the Taconic Park-
way in Williamson's car. It was evident 
all day that he was not well. He said 
little, but he drove us all home and 
then drove himself directly to the hos-
pital. There he had a major operation 
from which he never completely recov-
ered, largely because a severe burn had 
resulted in an abscess. After a long peri-· 
od of convalescence, he was able to re-
sume his duties, but with a series of un-
fortunate results. 

The new building went out for tend-
ers while he was incapacitated, and as 
often happens,- the architects had under-
estimated costs, and the bids came in too 
high. Williamson's assistant was able to 
reduce costs by cutting down the size in 
unfortunate places, unduly reducing 
heights of mezzanines and the areas be-
neath them, and narrowing aisles too 
much in critical places. 

Even so, the building became the first 
library building with modern fireproof 
construction, with a simple central 
bookstack, and with each floor of the 
stacks a separate fire unit. In most ways 
it was very functional and easy to use; 
it included the best library school quar-
ters in the country, together with a sep-
arate undergraduate area, the forerun-
ner of undergraduate libraries, which 
have since become popular! It was a 
great university library building; and, 
in spite of monumental features, it cost 
just about one-half as much as Yale's 
Sterling Library, which was built at the 
same time, had the same number of 
square feet, and was designed by the 
same architect. 

The library's most unfortunate points 
would have been avoided if CCW could 
have been on the spot to decide on the 
ways by which costs could be reduced. 
One other unfortunate feature of the 
building was the lighting in the large 
reading room on the front of the sec-
ond floor, designed by the dean of the 



Engineering School and heralded the 
best-lighted large reading room ever 
found anywhere; this was a . failure 
which has been avoided with improved 
lighting in many libraries constructed 
after World War II. During William-
son's illness and convalescence, his first 
wife became seriously ill and was hos-
pitalized until her death in 1939, but he 
continued his work at Columbia until 
retirement age of sixty-six in 1941. 

After his retirement as a librarian, 
Williamson served as consultant to the 
Connecticut State Education Television 
Commission until his death twenty-two 
years later in 1965 at the age of eighty-
eight. Librarianship · was not CCW' s 
only talent; he was a skilled carpenter, 
mechanic, and gardener, building with 
his own hands a very handsome addi-
tion to his home at Hastings on Hudson, 
looking out over the Hudson River, and 
later repairing and bringing up to date 
at least three old Connecticut homes. 

Williamson's career included a num-
ber of disappointments which would. 
have soured many persons' attitude to-
ward life but which did not affect him. 
He was in many ways a perfectionist 
and sometimes was unable to persuade 
his assistants and his colleagues to fol-
low in his footsteps. He could make 
enemies by plain speaking to those with 

Influential Librarians I 345 

whom he came in contact, both students 
and faculty, and while in many ways he 
was a very able administrator, he was 
unable to carry his staff and fellow fac-
ulty members with him in some of the 
strict rules he promulgated. 

When he ran for president of the 
American Library Association in 1938 
against Ralph Munn of Pittsburgh, who 
was seventeen years his junior, his loss 
was a surprise to him as it was to many 
of his colleagues. His unpopularity at 
Columbia was without question a bitter 
blow to him, although his work there as 
librarian and dean resulted in a well-
run library and a very successful library 
school, carried out in the first really 
modern libraryouilding. 

Finally, when one assesses influence 
on library development, his 1923 report 
on Training for Library Service clearly 
entitled him to rank with the five other 
great' librarians of whom I have written. 
In addition, he was a fine and devoted 
friend to those who knew him well. His 
influence with the Rockefeller and Car-
negie Corporations was a great help to 
library development. His knowledge of 
everything related to libraries and in-
stitutions of higher learning w.as tre-
mendous, and despite his relatively mi-
nor idiosyncracies he was a great man 
who should be remembered. 

REFERENCES 

1. William Landram Williamson, William 
Frederick Poole and the Modern Library 
Movement (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 
1963). 

2. Joseph Alfred Borome, The Life and Letters 
of Justin Winsor (Ann Arbor: Univ. Micro-
films, 1969). Thesis, Columbia University, 
1960. ' 

3. Douglas Waples and Harold D. Lasswell, 

National Libraries and Foreign Scholarship: 
Notes of Recent Selections in Social Sci-
ences (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 
1936 ). 

4. Charles C. Williamson, Training for Li-
brary Service: A Report Prepared for the 
Carnegie Corporation of New York (Boston: 
Merrymount Press, 1923).