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consideration to the selection of new faculty personnel.
Z.

The Library

(a) The Building. The urgent need for an enlargement of the present library
building was unanimously expressed, and that need was emphasized over and over
again in all conferences. The present building was designed for an institution of
3 000 students, but the original plan called for an extension of stock rooms by a
new wing to the South. The book collection has already far outgrown the space
allotted for the storage of books. At the present time some 135,000 books and
pamphlets are boxed up and are placed in corridors and in the basement. These
works are inaccessible to students or faculty or public use. Many other thousands
of volumes are stored on temporary shelves in the stack rooms or rest on the
floors. So urgent is the need of space that we think emergency funds should be
immediately provided to have the architectural planning required for the extension
done and ready for contract letting as soon as appropriations for construction are
available.
(b) The Book Collection. Although the present library is overflowing with books,
we still do not have enough of them. What the chemical laboratory is to the student
of chemistry, the library is to the student of history, languages, literatures, econo­
mics, philosophy, the social sciences, and many other subjects. Knowledge and
learning and writing do not stand still. The new publications coming annually from
the presses of the world should be incorporated into our library if it is rightfully
to do its job. It is true that the general library contains 434,000 volumes and is
still one of the largest collections in the South. Further, it has many notable special
collections, in some cases unequalled in value. It is true that it has a collection of
printed bibliographies giving it exceptional worth as an instrument of research. Our
library collections have been built up with devoted care, particularly by specialists
having an interest in acquiring library materials relative to the subject of their
fields of scholarship. There are many gaps, however, and one of the obligations of
the future will be the acquisition of a general research library. The library and
laboratory are the vital organs of the graduate school. The laboratories of the
sciences are for the present relatively well equipped. It is of the highest import­
ance, therefore, to the future of the University as a university that the book fund
of the library be so increased as to bring the University in line with institutions
of comparable character. But it is a fact - a fact thought of by the University com­
munity as little short of calamitous - that we have been losing ground in book acqui­
sitions, relatively, with startling rapidity. In comparison with southern institutions
alone, we have fallen from our former high rank in total volumes, annual increments,
appropriations for book purchases, and expenditures on staff. As a Committee, we
recommend that the process be stopped and reversed.
(c) Personnel. Evidence was offered to show that the library personnel is
seriously understaffed and underpaid; that it is inequitably paid in relation to faculty
salaries; that it is unable to keep pace with library and University growth; and that
it is forced to make drastic reduction in normal and proper service. It is estimated
that there is need of four professional assistants for the scientific libraries now
having no professional care at all and twelve professional assistants in the main
library. We were advised that, compared with other libraries, the staff at Chapel
Hill is seriously underpaid and practically every professional librarian there could
go elsewhere at nearly double the present salary. On e example of this is that an
expert cataloguer who, after fourteen years of service at the University, is now
actually receiving less salary than when she was appointed in 1928.
3.

The Graduate School and Funds for Research..

It cannot be too much emphasized that although a university may contain a
college, it is a very different thing from a college. Undergraduate teaching is
only one of the functions of an American university. Among its other purposes,
and really its distinctively important purpose, is the pursuit of truth and the exten­
sion of the boundaries of human knowledge. The distinction is often lost sight of
by the general public and doubtless by legislators, but it is a distinction that is
vital. The critical examination of the evidential bases of knowledge, the correction
of error, verification of dat&, and the discovery of new truth go under the accepted
term of research, and research, as it is usually regarded in university circles, is