Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/421

 SOME IMPORTANT DEPARTMENTS 367 tion to library administration and architecture. By request of the President he had, during a visit abroad, studied European libraries and library buildings. He had been chairman of the Library Commission and had advised with the architect in arranging the interior of the Harper Memorial Library. He possessed marked administrative qualities. When, therefore, commodious quarters for the University's books were assured and the time came for beginning the development of the Library on a large scale, Mr. Burton was the only man considered for the position of Director of the Libraries. J. C. M. Hanson of the Library of Congress was secured as Associate Director, and the staff of cataloguers and assistants was largely increased. In 1915-16 the staff numbered nearly if not quite one hundred members. More than thirty mem- bers of the staff were busily engaged in cataloguing new acquisi- tions, numbering about two thousand five hundred each month, and the accumulation of uncatalogued volumes of the old library which at the end of the quarter-century still exceeded a hundred thousand. They were also engaged in a great re-cataloguing task. After trial of other systems of classification, that finally adopted, which was intended to cover all the book resources of the Uni- versity Libraries, was a modification of the Library of Congress system. The appropriations of the University for salaries and other library expenses, exclusive of student service, for 1915-16 exceeded seventy-eight thousand dollars; for books and binding, thirty thousand; and for student service, fifteen thousand, making the total appropriations one hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. This may be regarded as the annual expenditure for the closing years of the first quarter-century. In the earlier years there were frequent special appropriations of considerable sums for the purchase of books, for example, fifty thousand dollars for a law library on the establishment in 1902 of the Law School and for the purchase and cataloguing of the Durrett Collection in 1913, thirty-seven thousand dollars. From the beginning the University acted on the principle that one of the essentials of a University was books, more books, and still more books. The Harper Memo- rial Library will house a million books. The library group of buildings and the departmental and house libraries will provide