University of Virginia Library

The Undergraduate, the Scholar, and the Collections

Considerable expansion of our Map and Print collections
(19,228 new maps and 12,527 new prints and pictures) will be
noted under the respective headings below. The relatively strong
growth of our holdings in maps has been stimulated by the establishment
in the University several years ago of a full-fledged School
of Geography. Cause and effect here are hard to distinguish.

A decade ago the McGregor Library was established in the
University, at once becoming the central and preeminent collection
among the several special libraries constituting the Division
of Rare Books and Manuscripts. Through this gift, Lawrence Wroth
wrote in 1945, "the Charlottesville institution . . . has become an
important center for American studies in a part of the country
where the materials for such studies had not previously existed in
strength and number." (In "The Chief End of Book Madness,"

Library of Congress Quarterly Journal . . . Vol. III, No. 1, Oct.
1945). In the meantime the collections of historical manuscripts, independent
of the McGregor Library, have increased by geometrical
progression. The American history faculty during the same
period has exactly doubled in size. The School of History has grown
to be the second largest department in graduate studies and has
outstripped all others in the humanities; its undergraduate section,
now numbering just under a thousand students, has today the
third largest enrollment of any school in the college of arts and
sciences. This is a phenomenon of some interest when one recalls
the New York Times Report of 1943 on the non-teaching of history
in American colleges, or even last month's report of a committee
of Virginia's General Assembly that "Virginia history and government,
as such, are not actually being taught in our schools."

In a year which has seen the bequest of the T. Catesby Jones
Collection of modern French prints, a generous addition to the
Fred O. Seibel Archive of contemporary political cartoons, and
some distinguished groups of historical engravings and political
cartoons of our earlier history, it is gratifying to report a notable
expansion of our facilities for the exhibits which have become an
increasingly popular activity of the Division. The new Exhibition
Gallery, opened several months ago with an exhibit from the Jones
Collection, has made it possible for undergraduates and other visitors
to examine closely many of the rarer items of large size, which
formerly were seldom seen except by the specialist.

The McGergor Library itself, once the almost exclusive domain
of the graduate student, the visiting biographer, and other
scholars, has become an increasing stimulus in undergraduate life.
Book collections of undergraduates are frequently displayed there,
and students in the college are active participants in the annual
book collectors' contests as well as in the work of the University
of Virginia Bibliographical Society, which meets in the room. The
McGregor Room Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry, conducted
in recent months by such men as Basil Willey, Willard
Thorp, and W. H Auden, have stirred such enthusiasm among undergraduates
that they threaten to outgrow the room.