Libraries: How Not to Waste Knowledge

The library that is most familiar to people is a hushed, well-stacked place, commanded—at least in fable—by a hushed, not-very-well-stacked spinster with her hair in a bun and ice in her eyes, and frequented by those who want to browse or drowse, study or doodle, read or simply exchange furtive notes with members of the opposite sex. There are still hundreds of such cozy havens all over the U.S., but they are turning into anachronisms. Their problem is that a technological age demands far more from a library than a quiet place to read and a random assortment of books.

Casual users of libraries are hardly aware of it, but library professionals and their more conscientious clients know about it all too well. They call it the "information explosion," and it has precipitated an odd paradox: most of the nation's public libraries have neither the money to buy nor the space to house the books and periodicals that a growing and insatiable public wants to read, while the technical disciplines—chiefly the sciences—have turned loose such a Niagara of information that even the wealthiest of corporate, collegiate or community libraries simply do not know what to do with it, let alone how to make it available to researchers.

"National Disgrace." Both the information explosion and the population explosion have forced libraries of all kinds to expand and to build anew at a spectacular rate, often with striking esthetic effect (see color pages). U.S. colleges alone more than doubled their annual library-building outlay, from $21 million to $58 million, between 1957 and 1962, and spent a total of $211 million. In the succeeding six-year period, from 1963 through 1968, they will have tripled that amount to $650 million. The nation's largest library, the Library of Congress, has just renovated its main reading room at a cost of $309,215.

Still, the nation's public libraries are in bad shape. The American Library Association, which sets a minimum standard of 10,000 library volumes for communities with fewer than 2,500 people, figures that 69% of the 7,260 public libraries in the U.S. are substandard. Of the 8,000 elementary schools in the country, fully 60% have no central libraries, a state of affairs that U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel calls "a national disgrace."

And, despite all the expansion, Allan Cartter, vice president of the American Council on Education, reckons that only 17% of the nation's college libraries meet the 100,000-volume standard that is considered minimum for good undergraduate instruction. Only 25 graduate schools, moreover, can boast the 1.5 million volumes considered minimal by the council. In all, says Cartter, only two dozen academic libraries are "really adequate." Among the best: Harvard's libraries (7,245,000 volumes), followed by those of Yale (4,703,000), Illinois (3,748,000), the University of California at Berkeley (2,956,000), Cornell (2,577,000), Stanford (2,416,000), and U.C.L.A. (2,007,000).