University of Virginia Library

4. THE CATALOGUE

The new general library building was the first essential
for the reorganization of the library service. Essential also
was an adequate catalogue of the printed books. This was
no new problem. Of the list which Thomas Jefferson prepared
in 1825 for the use of bookdealer Hilliard, we have
earlier stated that by all counts it was a remarkable achievement.
That statement has been reiterated through the
course of this history like a musical theme; and it emerges
once more at this point. To Hilliard the Jefferson achievement
was an order list. To the University its greatest value
was as a comprehensive and authoritative selection of the
essential works in all fields of learning. To the Library
it served as a model for the printed catalogue of 1828. That
catalogue followed the list in the arrangement by subjects
according to the Bacon-Jefferson system of classification. It

was thus virtually a shelf list. So also was William Wertenbaker's
remarkable memory. The compiler of the 1828
catalogue and a wholehearted admirer of the Founder, he
loyally kept that classification in use by shelving new books
according to its subjects. In the 1850's Librarian Holcombe's
two folio volume author catalogue entered books
according to the Gildersleeve rules revised by the Visitors.
Those rules, however, affected changes in cataloguing entry,
not in classification. A succession of Librarians of brief
terms and consequently short memories immediately followed
Wertenbaker's retirement, and the cataloguing problem
again became acute. The concern now was not for
classification but for some form of cataloguing that would
serve as a finding list. Adherence to the Bacon-Jefferson
classification had been dying of inanition, and it expired
unnoticed with the destruction of a large part of the original
collection in the burning of the Rotunda. It is significant
that Librarian Patton's adoption of the Dewey Decimal
Classification is not even noted in the records.

Meantime some bibliothecal Eli Whitney had advocated
use of a three by five library card (it is diverting to imagine
Mr. Jefferson's possible reactions), and in the decades following,
library cataloguing was thereby to expand mightily
in usefulness—and in problems. In the consideration of
what was to be placed on the fair surfaces of the library
cards, the movement was to be from simplicity to elaborateness
to an involved attempt to achieve maximum utility
with minimum cost.

The use of cards at the University of Virginia Library
had started before the date of the Rotunda fire, so that the
cataloguing of the new, postfire collections was uniform in
that respect. In other respects it was not so uniform. The
earlier cataloguing illustrated the stage of simplicity—some
of it had been very simple indeed. As later entries grew
more elaborate, the contrast became glaring. By the beginning

of the Library's second century, Librarian Patton was
inaugurating a modest project of recataloguing; and his
successor therefore had the advantage of being able to
coordinate the new efforts with a process already under way.
He also had the great advantage of the enthusiasm, unaccountable
to many people, with which the little group of
Cataloguers faced their intricate tasks.

By this time, however, the idea of developing a research
as well as a college library was taking firm root. This of
course rendered desirable an arrangement of the books that
would facilitate the quests of graduate students and research
scholars who would have direct access to the shelves. To this
end, a subcommittee of the Faculty Library Committee,
Chairman Metcalf, Professor Dumas Malone, and the
Librarian being members, made a study of classification
schemes. That subcommittee recommended the adoption
of the Library of Congress classification. The recommendation
was approved by the whole committee—but with the
proviso that the change await favorable circumstances.

When that action was taken, in February 1929, the circumstances
could scarcely have been less favorable. The
Cataloguing Staff was small, the shelves at the Rotunda were
overcrowded with books, there were no special funds, and
no depository set of Library of Congress cards was available.
Moreover this meant all of the library books, and it meant
that until the change could be actually begun, all of the
present cataloguing would afterwards have to be revised.
It was a decision that required courage and a large draft on
the reserves of patience.

Encouragement came soon through several favorable
turns of fortune. Word was received that the Library at
Princeton University had discarded a set of proof sheets
of Library of Congress cards, arranged by subject. Princeton's
Librarian, James Thayer Gerould, generously presented
that set to the Library at the Rotunda. Herbert Putnam,

Librarian of Congress, being apprised of the effort at
Charlottesville, with like generosity donated all cards
printed at the Library of Congress before the distribution
of proof sheets had been started. Subscription to proof
sheets following the Princeton set came within the means
of the University of Virginia Library. The combination of
the three sources afforded well nigh a complete set of
Library of Congress cards, thus reducing time and expense
in ordering cards for cataloguing, and at the same time
supplying for research use a much needed bibliographical
tool.

The interest manifested by the Library of Congress at
the beginning continued in various effective ways throughout
this cataloguing campaign. This is a type of service to
which little publicity has been given. But the Library at
the University of Virginia can join with many another
Library in testimony that ultimate success in undertakings
of this sort has depended to no small degree on the cooperation
freely granted by the National Library in Washington.

Almost at the moment the decision was reached for
adoption, whenever the time should be deemed propitious,
of the Library of Congress classification, there was
announcement of a grant to the University of Virginia from
the General Education Board of a Humanities Fund for
the five sessions from 1930 to 1935. A portion of that fund
was allotted to the Library. This meant a real beginning
in collection building on a research basis; and several Professors
who were added to the Faculty by means of that
fund were drawn into collaboration in the ensuing book
selection. At once the proposition was strongly advanced
that if the new books were to be made speedily available,
the cost of processing them should be added to the purchase
cost; in other words, that a part of the Library's share in
that grant should be devoted to salaries for additional
Cataloguers. The acceptance of the proposition was of

strategic value then and later towards the solution of the
inherited cataloguing problem.

Advantage was taken of the resultant enlargement of
the Cataloguing Staff to segregate a small group for special
cataloguing or for recataloguing projects. The removal in
1929 of the Medical Library from one of the oval rooms on
the ground floor of the Rotunda to the new medical buildings
at “The Corner” left that room available for this special
Cataloguing Staff; and the medical collection itself was
the first unit to be handled. That and the collection on
Fine Arts, which had recently been located in Fayerweather
Hall, occupied the special staff until September 1931. Work
was then started on the Classical Library in Cabell Hall.
The work on that unit, completed in July 1933, was a
striking proof of the validity of the proposition that purchase
and cataloguing costs should be linked; for some of
the Hertz books acquired in 1895 were now for the first
time made generally available.

It should be remembered, however, that all cataloguing
was still under the divisions and symbols of the Dewey
System. It was not until 1933, four years after the decision
by the Faculty Library Committee, that a possible break
appeared in the confining wall of circumstances. That came
in the announcement one morning of a donation by William
Andrews Clark of funds for a new building for the
Department of Law, a building in which there should be
more spacious equipment for the Law Library. Within a
half hour after the announcement, request had been made
for the use, until the new general library building should
be secured and made ready, of the Law Library's vacated
space and former equipment in Minor Hall. To Minor
Hall, therefore, was moved the small special staff, to it were
transferred some of the uncatalogued gift collections, and
the strategy of a “nucleus library” was devised—a unit
catalogued in the Library of Congress classification to

become a nucleus for use in the hoped-for new building. It
was pleasantly appropriate that the first gift collection to be
handled was the private library of President Alderman,
which had been donated by Mrs. Alderman.

Work on the nucleus library began in July 1933. It was
interrupted by the cataloguing of the Lomb books on
Optics, which were acquired in 1934, and of the books of
the Engineering Library during their transfer in 1934–1935
from the Mechanical Laboratory to Thornton Hall, the
new headquarters of the Department of Engineering. When
the time came in 1938 for the Minor Hall group to move
to the Alderman Library a total of 33,972 volumes had been
catalogued, of which 24,788 were in the nucleus collection.

As soon as the new building was assured, it was estimated
that February 1937 was the earliest possible date for
the Cataloguers at the Rotunda to make their beginning in
the use of the Library of Congress classification. Thereafter
both groups of Cataloguers speeded their efforts; and at
the end of the session of 1937–1938 there were altogether
76,853 volumes in the new catalogue. It was a pursuit race,
however. For by that time the 131,422 total of 1925 had
been increased to 303,502, and the magnitude of a cataloguing
campaign on two fronts, backward and forward, had
become impressively evident. So also had the value of that
campaign. For with the new catalogue and the old filed side
by side in the entrance hall of the Alderman building, one
growing rapidly and the other more slowly shrinking in size,
it was soon observed that the use by readers was being concentrated
well nigh exclusively on the new.

This use by readers was given its rightful importance in
the cataloguing campaign. Cataloguers, intent on their task,
run some danger of coming to regard the catalogue as an
end in itself, rather than a means for the service of users.
Now it had so happened that the majority of the leaders in
this undertaking at the University of Virginia had personally

had experience in circulation work before becoming
Cataloguers. Moreover, during the strenuous first years in
the Alderman Library, when the Reference Division was
sorely undermanned, it became the practice that volunteers
from the Preparations Division should spend several hours
weekly in reference service routines. Therefore, along with
realization of the necessity of consistent maintenance of
standards, there was kept active some recognition of the
practical difficulties of a public unacquainted with cataloguing
rules.

Ever since the readings in 1927 and 1928 from the
American Library Association's Survey of Libraries in the
United States, these Cataloguers had endeavored to keep
abreast of general progress in cataloguing procedures, had
taken part in library conferences and in such experiments
as cooperative cataloguing, and had shared in the heart
searching after the publication in the October 1941 issue
of the Library Quarterly of Andrew Delbridge Osborn's
“The Crisis in Cataloguing.” During the years of the second
world war, the University of Virginia Library had the
gratification of renewing its earlier link with the Library
of Congress, based on Thomas Jefferson's part in the founding
of both libraries, by supplying safety storage for various
valuable materials from the National Library and by housing
its Union Catalogue, with its Staff. The resulting period
of direct access to the Union Catalogue, that extraordinary
asset to research, was of unique value to the University of
Virginia Cataloguers. It was also a matter of local satisfaction
that the University's cataloguing campaign enabled it
to contribute to the National Union Catalogue copies of all
its cards, including those of the Law Library. For that
statement there should be clarification on two points.

The first looks back to an action by the Faculty Library
Committee in 1928, establishing a policy of centralized
library administration, to include all collections except the

Law Library. Prior to that action a study of another American
Library Association publication, George Alan Works'
College and University Library Problems, had proved useful.
By that policy, matters of staff appointment, budget
preparation, and book selection became the joint responsibility
of the heads of the various departments or schools
concerned and the Librarian or his representative; the
acquisitions and preparations tasks were centered in the
staff of the general library; the circulation procedures were
performed by the staffs of the libraries in which the books
were located; and reference aid was supplied by the local
staffs or, when it seemed appropriate, by the reference staff
of the general library. Since the cataloguing was done by
the Preparations Division of the general library (with the
public catalogue in the general library serving as a union
catalogue for university books and with local catalogues at
the separate libraries), it could become a standard order of
business to supply cards to the National Union Catalogue.

As for the Law Library, that was benefiting immeasurably
by the vigorous and constructive interest of the Law
Alumni. In 1938 a special alumni committee, headed by
Paul Brandon Barringer, Jr., prepared a detailed and
searching report on the Law School with somewhat special
reference to its Library. That and a survey made a year
later by Elisha Riggs McConnell served as blueprints for
reorganization of the Law Library. Its collections and its
service became thereafter a focal point of concern for the
Alumni of the Department of Law. It may indeed be noted
that during the latter part of the 1925–1950 period, alumni
interest in the Law, Medical, and Engineering Libraries
and in the browsing room and international studies collections
of the Alderman Library was in striking contrast to
the widespread contention that the enthusiasm—or the criticism
—of alumni is stimulated mainly by prowess on the
playing fields.

Under this incitement from the Law Alumni, the reorganization
of the Law Library was speeded in 1942 by the
appointment of Miss Frances Farmer, a graduate in law
and the former Law Librarian of the University of Richmond,
to take charge of the cataloguing of the law collection.
On the retirement of Mrs. Graves in 1945, with a
noteworthy record of thirty-three years of service, Miss
Farmer became Law Librarian. As in the case of the general
library reorganization, some of the very difficulties of those
years were turned to favorable account. For the severe drop
in the enrollment of law students during war days resulted
in minimum use of the law books and thereby speeded the
progress of the cataloguing. By 1944 a survey of the results
by Miles Oscar Price, Librarian of the Columbia University
School of Law, brought forth a meed of hearty praise for
the results—which had produced not only a notably effective
catalogue for the Law Library in Clark Hall but also complete
representation in the combined catalogue of university
books in the Alderman Library and, with the approval
of Dean Frederick Deane Goodwin Ribble and Miss
Farmer, in the Union Catalogue at the Library of Congress.
Therefore, because the cataloguing campaigns during 1925–
1950 covered all the university books, the contribution of
the University of Virginia to the National Union Catalogue
was complete.

By the close—at least the fighting close—of the second
world war, the termination of that huge cataloguing task
was in sight. Some remnants remained, as did also the collection
of public documents and an accumulation of pamphlets.
But there was access to the documents by means of
the symbols of the Superintendent of Documents; and
pamphlet cataloguing, having run the gamut from an elaborate
and costly method, had reached the stage of an experiment
in simplified handling. Therefore the main business
of cataloguing was thereafter reduced to the processing of

current additions. The word “reduced” has reference to
the vast undertaking that had been in operation. But there
should be emphasis also on the fact that by 1950 the unending
task of handling the yearly acquisitions had itself grown
to major proportions. During the session of 1949–1950 the
number of books made accessible for use in all of the University
Libraries was 40,893. In the last year of Librarian
Wertenbaker's active service, the total collection was
reported as “about 36,000 volumes.” Thus the increase in
the single year 1949–1950 was considerably in excess of the
whole collection at the end of its first fifty-five years. Moreover
access to that earlier collection was not by the open
sesame of a library card catalogue but by the tenacious but
mortal memory of William Wertenbaker.