100 Years of Starr Library
200 Years of the College Library
by Robert Buckeye
Reprinted in full with the permission of Robert Buckeye. Originally printed as part of a collection of essays titled, The Library at Middlebury College . Published by Starr Library, 2000.
Robert Buckeye was Abernethy Curator of American Literature and College Archivist at Middlebury College.
Six months before Middlebury College was granted a charter by the State of Vermont, the College Library was incorporated in April, 1800, and 34 shares of stock at $25 per share were sold to buy books for the library. In 1809, the library went public, offering full use of its collection to those who purchased stock shares. At that time, the library's holdings did not exceed 500 volumes. By 1836, the size of the collection was less than 3000 volumes, smaller than the combined collections of the student-run Philomathesian and Philadelphian Society libraries, but the College Library nevertheless moved into larger facilities on the second floor of the recently completed chapel on Old Stone Row. It was not until President Benjamin Labaree returned from his sabbatical in Europe in 1858 with 3400 volumes that the College Library reached 10,000 volumes.
The decision to make provision for a library a half year before Middlebury College came into existence underlines how crucial Middlebury's founding fathers thought a library to be for a college education. However, we need to understand how little the library of the nineteenth century is like that of the twentieth, and that these differences have to do with the uses to which books were put in the nineteenth century and the aims of a college education. Study was less library research than contemplation of a classical text. One read not to acquire information to use in the world or to train oneself for a profession, but instead to sharpen the mind, heighten the moral sense, develop character. What one read determined, in part, who one was. Thus we understand the nineteenth century institutional library best if we see it to be like that of the personal library of the gentleman. You could enter and ask to check out a book from the faculty member nominally in charge. Since he knew the collection well, he might say something about the book, but he did not provide what we consider reference and research assistance today. Organization was minimal, if not haphazard, and classification did not exist; sometimes the faculty librarian might not be able to find the book requested. The scope of the collection was limited to the classical curriculum. There were no novels in the College Library until the library of the Philomathesian Society was incorporated into the main library at the end of the century.
In 1881, President Cyrus Hamlin moved the library to the north end of Painter Hall, personally supervising the rearrangement of all four floors into reading rooms and stacks. The library was now open daily instead of weekly, with free access to the stacks; a card catalog had been implemented (Hamlin himself cataloged books); a full-time assistant librarian was employed to aid the faculty member in charge; a reading room with a selection of current periodicals was established; and library privileges were granted to those outside the College. (With the admission of women students in 1883, male and female students were assigned to use the library at different times.) In 1884, the Library also became a United States Government depository. For the first time, the library began to resemble the library as we know it.
We may attribute these changes less to circumstances inside the College than to those outside. Education had begun to be influenced by scientific inquiry and method. The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species in 1859 and Friedrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy in 1873 were but two of the more significant events which characterized the new world order and cast doubts about the old one. The scientific disenchantment of the world was beginning, and the Bible and the Greek world would now have to be seen differently. Their significance for scholarship would never again be as great. At the same time, the implementation of uniform training and standards for medicine, law, and education changed these fields from practices to professions In 1876, Melvil Dewey formulated his decimal system the same year he founded the American Library Association. In 1887, the first library school was founded at Columbia University. When Hamlin became President in 1880, he not only faced the lowest enrollment since 1845 (39 students), but also an educational world that was rapidly changing, and he knew if Middlebury did not adapt, it would not long survive. If Hamlin was instrumental, then, in improving Middlebury's prospects through his decisions to renovate and refurbish existing buildings, to erect the first college boarding hall, and to admit women, he was no less so in his efforts to bring the College Library into the modern world.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the College Library's holdings were roughly double what they were in 1860. Nevertheless, it was already clear that the library of the twentieth century would be unlike that of the nineteenth, and that the difference was only partially determined by scale. If the increasing need for more information necessitated more space for materials, it also increased the need for trained professional staff and services to assist access to materials both inside and outside the library. At the beginning of the twentieth century, hospitals, museums, and libraries had already become not only well-defined architectural spaces but also complex administrative units which demanded a battery of services and personnel to fulfill their functions. The library of the gentleman in the interior of his home or the physician who made house calls had become vestigial. Thus when Middlebury College made plans to dedicate a separate library building as the crowning achievement of its Centennial celebrations in 1900, it did so not because it needed more space for books, but because the functions of libraries had changed. After all, from 1860 to 1900, the Library had grown by only 290 volumes per year.
Egbert Starr, son of Middlebury trustee, Peter Starr, pledged $50,000 for the construction of a library. Starr, with his half-brother, Charles (neither of whom were Middlebury graduates), had made a succession of important gifts to the College, beginning with a gift to build Starr Hall in 1864. Starr's son, New York physician, Moses Allen Starr, added $10,000, half of which would be spent on books and half for oak paneling and pilasters, a marble fireplace, and decoration of ceilings and walls. The first design, proposed in 1898, was a Romanesque two-story structure, much like recent buildings at the University of Vermont, that would house 75,000 volumes. Instead, a Classic design was selected, and on July 3, 1900, during Commencement exercises, Egbert Starr Library was dedicated. Built of Vermont marble, it had fluted marble columns and Doric capitals and a frontage of 70 feet, with a pillared portico in the center. It was the first College structure to be built of machine-finished marble.
The dedication of Starr Library in 1900 was the single most important event of the twentieth century for Middlebury College. Without a library in the full-sense of the term (not just a warehouse for storage), Middlebury could not consider itself a first-rate educational institution. "Every other building but [Widener Memorial Library] could burn to the ground," George Lyman Kittredge noted walking through Harvard Yard at the beginning of the century, "and we would still have a university." It is still true at the end of the century. "The fundamental formula for academic excellence," William H. Gass writes, does not change: "a great library will attract a great faculty, and a great faculty will lure good students."
Within a decade, it was clear not only what the functions and services of the modern library would be, but also what problems were inherent in its operation. Thus at the beginning of the century, we have in embryo the library of its end. The Age of Information had begun. By 1911, Starr Library had exhibits, did book repair, and offered library instruction. There was a circulation charge system, a display of new books, and a bulletin board with reading lists on various subjects. The first cataloger was hired and the Library engaged in a recataloging project. The library also purchased a typewriter, which "proved to be a great time-saver." In addition to Starr Library, there were three departmental libraries. That year the Library added 1,105 volumes and circulation was 6,888; a year later, it began inter-library loan. "The day is past," Librarian Etta Clark (1909-1913) wrote, "when the chief duty of the Librarian was to order books and preserve them. How to get them used most extensively and most intelligently is the chief concern." By 1911, however, the library had run out of space. There was no longer sufficient room for more books or places for students to study.
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What I want to argue here, and it is the major point I want to make in this essay, is that the problems which libraries faced in the twentieth century were inevitable as long as information was the goal. In 1924, Jose Ortega y Gasset argued in an address given to an international conference of librarians that the increasing proliferation of books had slowed the acquisition of knowledge, not increased it, as cars had snarled traffic in cities. It was no longer possible, he continued, for anyone to command a field of knowledge. What we know is less and less. Increasingly, we have to rely on the expert and specialist, and our ignorance insures our dependence. The rule of the expert thus becomes the intellectual linchpin for the professionalization of medicine, law, education, and librarianship.
In the Age of Information, one always needs more and no library is large enough; there is increasing dependence upon the professional to guide one through fields one knows less and less about; and technology is seen to be the vehicle of our salvation. The long century of Starr is a history of development, renovation and expansion; of ever-increasing acquisitions and greater dependence on materials elsewhere, whether those come to the researcher through inter-library loan or, later in the century, via a computer screen; of increasingly complex and necessary professional assistance and services; and the application of newer, more sophisticated technology. To note that in 1900 the Library had 21,800 volumes in its entire collection and that in 1995, it added 26,650; or that in 1912 the year's total of three inter-library loans is less than an hour's work in inter-library loan today does not, I think, change the terms of the equation. The librarian doing reference in 1900 would understand the principles of database searching. It is no accident that at the beginning of the 21st century librarians refer to themselves as information specialists.
The 21,800 volumes in Starr Library at its dedication in 1900 had grown to 132,000 volumes by 1940, and by 1980, to 440,000. Today it has close to 900,000. During the same years, inter-library loans increased from 167 to 8,810 to 15,337. In 1911, circulation statistics show 6,888 transactions; in 1999, 164, 887. Thus in 1911 the patron checked out an average of 22 books, while in 1999, he checked out 70. (We should note that there were 102 books per patron in 1911, 382 in 1999.) Although the researcher today reads more than his 1911 counterpart, he does so for different reasons, and what he reads is more diverse. It is not simply that there is more to read. Today one reads, more often than not, as a means to an end, and one does not necessarily read a book through. Yesterday one read a book from beginning to end. This difference in emphasis produced a difference in scale which in itself changed scholarship. It transformed libraries.
Because of Middlebury's emphasis on language training and study beginning with the German School in 1915, and continuing today with eight graduate language programs in the summer schools, as well as the English and writing programs of the Bread Loaf English schools, Starr Library has built substantial literature and language collections. It has also been aided immeasurably through gifts, including Julian W. Abernethy's American literature collection (1924), Helen Hartness Flanders' New England ballad collection (1941), and Corinne Tennyson Davids' Robert Frost collection (1952). We should also note Noah Webster's gift of books after receiving an honorary doctorate in 1830; Helen G. Tasheira's incunabula; the Henry S. Francis collection of art books and catalogs; and the Daphne and Eugene Berenbach collection of French historical materials. The abandonment of the classical curriculum and, later in the century, any narrow core curriculum further diversified Starr Library holdings. More recently, the emphasis on independent study for students, particularly the use of primary materials, further complicates collection development. The efforts of Middlebury's presidents during the century, particularly those of President James I. Armstrong (1963-1975), who doubled the library's acquisitions budget, were instrumental in the library keeping pace with increasing need for more materials and insuring that the College had a first-rate library to support its educational aspirations.
Of course, there had to be expansion, and Starr Library underwent renovation at roughly twenty-five year intervals. In 1928, the generosity of Dr. Moses Allen Starr made possible the addition of east and west wings to the original building. The new wings reflected the simple classical style of the older building and were built of the same bluish white Vermont marble. The west wing housed the reserve room, a freshman room and a faculty room. The east wing housed the 7,000 volume Abernethy Library of American Literature on the main level, while the Henry Sheldon Coin Collection, the Vermont Collection and a Fine Arts Room were housed in the lower level. The new wings greatly expanded the library's capacity, allowing an increase from 40,000 volumes in 1921 to 132,000 in 1940.
However, by 1956 the need for an expanded facility had once again become urgent, and a second renovation was completed in a three-stage process between 1959 and 1962. It added a new wing which extended both east and south of the main building, and included study booths, seminar rooms, more stack areas, and modernized facilities. At the time, the new wing was the most expensive single structure the College had ever built (cost was $1,350,000). But when President Olin C. Robison (1975-1990) was inaugurated in 1975 only 13 years later, he made library expansion a top priority, since the building had seating capacity for only 330 students and shelving for only 300,000 volumes. The new wing, named for L. Douglas Meredith, former chairman of the trustees, was dedicated in 1979. The Meredith Wing extended Starr further east, and provided shelving for another 200,000 volumes, 140 additional seats, and improved quarters for the microform collection.
"Libraries, once regarded as storehouses, and their attendants as guardians of books," Librarian Margaret Fayer (1945-1963) wrote in 1954, "have now become campus workshops, humanistic laboratories, with their librarians assuming more and more of an educative role." To what extent the library had become a campus workshop or humanistic laboratory may be a reach, but that it can be asserted at all without hyperbole emphasizes the more active educational role of the librarian in the twentieth century. The size of libraries and the number of volumes they house may be the most visible change in libraries in the twentieth century, but the professional service and teaching that librarians now do is the most dramatic and significant. Starr Library is certainly no exception.
In 1911, the librarian may have given instruction in the use of the library, but as collections increased, research diversified, and education became broader, the training and assistance librarians provided became both more comprehensive and sophisticated. Earlier in the century, librarians met with individual classes, often more than once, lectured to large groups, tested students. Films were produced and handouts prepared. Today the reference librarians of Starr offer a wide variety of services, training and assistance unthinkable before, from individual and group sessions with classes and students, including senior thesis seminars; preparation of guides, indexes, and pathfinders; instruction and assistance with electronic databases and technology; the publication of a library newsletter; and the construction of websites. Libraries are no longer warehouses of materials. They are sites where we might be guided through the Sargasso of information.
At the same time, the possibilities offered by computer technology have permitted the catalog librarian to provide both greater and more immediate access to materials. Here, we cannot underestimate the extent to which bibliographic description and catalog tools, such as keyword searching, serve in their own right as reference tools. The catalog is often the first step in research, and an inadequate one means not only that parts of the collection are not accessible, but also that they are, in effect, not there at all. The decisions to convert Dewey classification to Library of Congress in 1967; to join the OCLC nation-wide cooperative cataloging in 1972; and to close the card catalog in 1987 for an on-line one were crucial steps in the modernization of Starr Library.
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The discussion at the end of the century about the implications of the virtual library obscures its principal issue: the proximity of materials to patron. From the beginning, Starr Library was not the only library on campus. In 1911, there were three other libraries, and since then Starr Library has had administrative supervision for departmental libraries, dormitory libraries, even a library at the Snow Bowl. As late as 1943, there were 11 libraries on campus, including ones for art, engineering, chemistry, biology, physics, geology, the Maison Francaise. Today there are three branch libraries: the Music Library in the Center for the Arts; the Armstrong Science Library in the newly-dedicated Bicentennial Hall; and the Davison Library on the Bread Loaf campus. Starr Library also provides materials and assistance to two libraries elsewhere (Bread Loaf Santa Fe and the Ilsley Public Library in Middlebury). It has been a cardinal tenet of libraries to make materials readily available. The decentralized, departmental or dormitory library may be closer to the faculty office or student room than a central main library, but since the size of such libraries is, of necessity, limited, one still has to go elsewhere for materials (and in the Age of Information, as I have argued, the research net is never wide enough). The management of such libraries is also more difficult and expensive. Thus the centralized library is both more cost-efficient and keeps more materials close at hand than the smaller, decentralized library. However, the growth of computer applications and increased use of the Internet in libraries may eradicate this issue. With computer technology, what is far away can also be close at hand.
There is no question that technology has transformed the library (as it has all else), but we remain uncertain about its consequences. We thought cars would take us from A to B more quickly. We did not see how cities would change, and how different our lives would be. Certainly, technology has made some library work easier and made information available that could not be retrieved without it. The annual reports of Starr Library are a litany of the benefits of technology, of how the typewriter, electric eraser, electric stylus, adding machine, duplicating machine, microfilm, photocopier, teletype, and computer have eased work and expanded possibilities. However, if we value how technology serves us, we must also acknowledge that we serve it. We do things its way, or not at all. I noted that in the Age of Information no amount of information is sufficient, even though technology permits us to have more information than ever before. "The problem," Avital Ronell writes, "is that technical advances multiply needs." Thus if technology is able to bring us more information, it also creates a need for more information. One spiral reinforces the other. How librarians master this problem becomes their challenge for the twentieth-first century.
As late as 1954, Librarian Margaret Fayer refers to the library as the heart of the college. What that means, if it means anything beyond the recognition that schools are about education and that it is the classroom and library where education happens, is not that clear. Certainly there was the implication in the first half of the twentieth century, in ways that were not true for the nineteenth-century library, that, yes, the library is at the heart of any educational institution, and that it functions in such a capacity beyond its designated services and holdings. At what date the shift occurred we cannot be certain, but certainly it was made possible after the model for a library had ceased to be that of the gentleman's private collection and had become instead that of the public institution. To some extent, Starr did serve as the heart of the college the first half of this century. It was the art museum before the college had a museum. It served as the center for news and information from the outside world (its exhibits often changed weekly to provide information about current events). The Abernethy Lecture, first given by Robert Frost in 1929, was the most important lecture of the school year. Faculty readings and freshman orientation took place in the Abernethy Library. The Librarian spoke in the chapel and the trustees once held a meeting in the library. The current Abernethy Speaker Series is second only to the Concert Series in terms of duration on campus. All these reinforce the sense of the library as a central pulse for what goes on in a college.
It speaks of a time gone by. We do not imagine the library will occupy as central a role anymore, and no college today sees itself simply in terms of faculty, students, and library. Technology has further exploded the possibility of site. Dispersal is its effect, and fragmentation. One can hold a manuscript in hand, but where is the text on the computer screen? In the world of the future, the library will be everywhere and nowhere. At the present time, however, books continue to proliferate rather than disappear, and technology has, in some ways, increased our need and use of them. Nevertheless, the dynamics of research have not changed, and the library remains the vehicle through which material is transmitted from its source to use, even if what we mean by library is less a site than a system, less a location than a sphere. A network.