College and Research Libraries


To the Editor: 

The article, "Three Early Academic Li-
brary Surveys," by Norman D. Stevens in 
the N ovem her issue provides an interest-
ing and useful footnote to academic li-
brary history, and Mr. Stevens is to be 
congratulated for having dug out two un-
published surveys which antedate the sem-
inal one of the University of Georgia Li-
brary in 1938. He can certainly be for-
given for having failed to locate still an-
other earlier "survey of an American col-
lege library by an outside expert." (page 
499) That is, the three of 1915, 1937, 
and 1938 of which he writes are not " the 
earliest independent approaches to the aca-
demic library survey." (page 505) 

In 1934 or 1935, and not later than 
June of 1935, when I left Chicago, Wil-
liam M. Randall, under whom I was writ-
ing a doctoral dissertation at the Graduate 
Library School, invited me to serve with 
him on a survey of the library of Wash-
ington College, Chestertown, Maryland. 
Naturally, I accepted with alacrity, though 
I had no idea at the time that I was par-
ticipating in a very early and then quite 
rare kind of professional activity. 

Randall and I spent a couple of days in 
Chestertown where we were handsomely 
entertained by President Mead and his 
wife, and where Randall proved himself as 
excellent a seminar leader in the field as 
he was in the classroom. I learned a great 

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Letters 
deal from him, and I owe him much. We 
examined the usual things, budget, per-
sonnel, book selection and collections, 
which were my particular responsibility, 
space and so on, and had discussions with, 
among others, members of the library com-
mittee and of the library staff. 

In due course, we prepared our report 
of which one-or possibly two-copies went 
to President Mead, one Randall kept and 
one he gave to me. Although I consider 
myself a pack rat in the matter of pre-
serving documents, I am chagrined to 
say that an exhaustive search of my files 
has failed to turn up a copy of the report 
on the Washington College Library. Pos-
sibly Randall, now president of the Wil-
mington, North Carolina College, may still 
have a copy. More likely, perhaps, is the 
existence of one in the files of the presi-
dent's office at the College. 

My purpose in reporting this small ad-
dendum to the article by Mr. Stevens is 
not so much to point out another earlier-
than-1938 independent library survey, and 
my association with it, but rather to sug-
gest that there may be still other very 
early surveys, and to express the hope that 
librarians who have participated in them , 
or know of them, will come forward . 

]. Periam Danton 
Professor of Librarianship 
University of California, Berkele y 

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