Collections : [Columbia University Archives]

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.

This series contains the records transferred to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library from 1983 to 1989. These additions are made up for the most part of correspondence files, subject files or the library's Central Files, and the Director's Office files. The original order of the materials has been preserved and related additions have not been integrated but have been kept in the order and context in which they were received.