Launching and Relaunching the Academic Library Collection
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INTRODUCTION
HISTORY
THE "CORE COLLECTION"
THE ELECTRONIC
COLLECTION
VENDORS
UNIVERSITY of NORTHERN B.C.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AT CARBONDALE IN NIIGATA
ROYAL ROADS UNIVERSITY
AMERICAN UNIVERSITYat SHARJAH
NATIONAL and UNIVERSITY LIBRARY of BOSNIA and HERZEGOVINA
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
HISTORY
The invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century made
little difference to the academic libraries. Books were still expensive
and remained of little importance to the university that still
instructed students orally and with text-books of collected
lectures.
Universities did not need nor have an significant budget for new scholarly books. But the profileration of books encouraged benefactors to purchase books for the university libraries, or to donate their own collections to the university libraries, and the "library became more important as the source of supplementary reading and individual study" [Budd]
In 1600 Sir Thomas Bodley undertook to re-establish the library at Oxford University with donations of money, some his own, some raised by him. He also travelled through Europe and purchased books for the university. By 1605 the library had 5,611 volumes "including printed and manuscript books." The English universities were the model for the colonial unversities in America [Budd].
Harvard College was founded in 1638 with a small theological library donated by clergyman John Harvard. “This was typical of many early colonial colleges, which were established with the donation of a private collection of books by one of the founders [Fourie and Dowell]. Mainly, these books were unavailable and unneeded. The library was open only a few hours a day, books were chained to the table, and the room itself was cold and poorly lit. Until 1877 the primary task of the Harvard College Library was to accumulate and store books [Fourie and Dowell]. Students and faculty had no need of these books.
Harvard Library
Courtesy
of PlanetWare
Two important shifts in the late nineteenth century forced the
academic
libraries to relaunch their collections. First came the call for
curriculum to shift away from the standard subject of theology and the
standard teaching format of recitation. Elective courses became a
faculty battleground, with some in favour of allowing students to
choose from a wide variety of subjects that would be supported by
library acquisitions, and those who wanted to maintain the status quo.
“The spokesperson for this curriculum reform was Charles William Eliot,
the president of Harvard College, who spent 40 years beginning in 1869,
fighting for the elective system at Harvard and elsewhere [Atkins]. By
the end of the 19th century, electives had been established across the
United States.
“This curriculum change resulted in an expensive expansion in the size
of the faculty, in the building of new library facilities and in a
dramatic increase in the size of the libraries…[Atkins].
The second shift was the development in the United States of a
German-style graduate program at Johns Hopkins University which was
founded in 1876 as a graduate school that focused on individual
research [Atkins]. Atkins
writes “the spirit of the new
institution was to search for scientific truth through sophisticated
research techniques” [Atkins].
This meant the development
of a research library in addition to the undergraduate library.
This new research opportunity was limited only by budget, as just about
everything published was considered worthy of study.
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