The Role of the Academic Librarian, 1876-1976

in 1976, with their multi-million volume collections, staffs in the hundreds, bud-gets in millions of dollars, and monu-mental buildings, to conceive of the minuscule beginnings of academic li-braries a centur-y ago. Only two univer-sity libraries in the nation, Harvard and Yale, held collections in ·excess of 100,000 volumes, and no state university possessed as many as 30,000 volumes. they were members of the teaching fac-ulty. The ordinary practice was to list librarians with registrars, museum cu-rators, and other miscellaneous officers. Combination appointments were com-mon, e.g., the librarian of the Univer-sity of California was a professor of English; at Princeton the librarian was professor of Greek, and the assistant li-brarian was tutor in Greek; at Iowa State University the librarian doubled as professor of Latin; and at the Uni-versity of · Minnesota the librarian served also as president.