Libraries in Land-Grant Colleges

Abstract

SEVENTY or more pages of L unfilled questionnaire lay on the desk of a land-grant university librarian in the summer of I928. His first reaction was, How 0 Lord! how long! This depression, however, was temporary, for it soon became evident that this library section of the questionnaire of the Land Grant College and University Survey had been planned intelligently and that it promised findings and conclusions of value. The final report justifies this anticipation. The library section, which with a five-page report on the libraries of Negro landgrant colleges in Volume II covers I 10 pages, is one of the most detailed parts of the report. No one person is given credit for the completed work, but the inclusion on the Survey staff of Mr. Charles H. Brown, librarian at Iowa State College, gives a clue to the chief collaborator. No librarian can read this section without mingled feelings of encouragement at the progress made by the libraries of some of the institutions surveyed and of discouragement at the slow progress and lack of interest in adequate library service which the report makes evident. So definite are the data and so well fortified are the conclusions that it is difficult to see how the college and university executives most concerned can fail to be stimulated to attempt improvement if they read this part of the report. The General Conclusions' are comprehensive and might well serve as a starting point for those executives and others whose interest in libraries is more or less perfunctory and who therefore might be inclined to pass by the detailed preceding chapters. One paragraph will be quoted in full because of its general and perennial truth: