Word: metcalfe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Houghton Library for rare books was opened, complete with temperature and humidity control. In 1945, in response to a hint that Metcalf had dropped at a dinner some years before, Manhattan Financier Thomas W. Lamont (1892) gave Harvard $1,500,000 for a new open-stack undergraduate library. Meanwhile, Metcalf helped to set up the New England Deposit Library, in which colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area store their little-used books, and the Farmington Plan by which colleges and universities buy foreign publications in common, thus covering the foreign field thoroughly while avoiding wasteful duplications...
...Catching Up. Today, Metcalf's musty, dusty empire includes 86 different collections scattered throughout Harvard's various schools: in all, nearly 6,000,000 volumes worth at least $60 million. It has a regular staff of 350, spends $2,400,000 a year. Some 15,000 students and scholars a day pass through some library door. Metcalf's life has been to see that they get the books they want as quickly as possible. Among the headaches this involves...
...select the 135,000 volumes they add each year, the library staff must pore over thousands of reports and reviews. "The book trade figures about 12,000 new books are coming out in this country each year," says Metcalf. "There are also 50,000 periodicals and reports, 15,000 publications from the U.S. Government Printing Office, 20,000 to 30,000 each year from the U.N.-many of them only small pamphlets, but somebody has to keep track of them...
...Because of the intricacies of cataloguing, filing, labeling and binding even a free book costs Harvard about $5.75. New additions, new editions, new language uses mean constant housekeeping, and "there are people," says Metcalf, "who will spend a whole day cataloguing one book, if we don't stop them." Keeping the stacks in order is a career in itself: should some one replace a book on the wrong shelf, it may be lost for years...
...present rate of growth, the Harvard library will have 11,500,000 volumes by the year 2000. But even then it will not be big enough. "We estimate," says Metcalf, "that there are now 30 million books and pamphlets of value for research. We don't have even a quarter of what is theoretically desirable...