Series I. Correspondence, 1899-1926

Scope and content:

The records that comprise the Columbia University Library Office Files, Correspondence (1898-1926) include the institutional correspondence and related professional material from the office of the university librarian and other members of the library staff. The files track a series of changes in the university library's administration, beginning with the movement of the library uptown in 1898 to its new location within Low Library in the Morningside Heights campus and conclude in 1926 with the hiring of a new permanent head of the library, Charles C. Williamson, after a series of interim library directors. During this period, the library underwent significant changes with the institution of new efficiency measures, changes in classification systems and record-keeping (as the library instituted a modified version of the Dewey Decimal System in the early 1900s, and transferred to card-catalogs in 1904), and changes in institutional structure as new departmental and divisional libraries were established and new administrative divisions––like Accessions, Cataloging, Shelving, Serial, and Reference Departments––emerged and were codified during the first decades of the century. Canfield's efforts were to maximize the accessibility of library collections, conducting reports and surveys on the state of public libraries making efforts to establish for systematic surveys of special collections across the U.S. and to campaign to make government documents more publically accessible.

Contents

Access and use