The Institute of Governmental Studies and its library are inextricably linked. In the beginning, the Bureau of Public Administration and the library were one and the same. A library of ephemeral materials had been established in the Department of Economics in 1918, and in 1921 a similar library called the Bureau of Public Administration was founded in the political science department. In 1926 the two combined as the Library of Economic Research and Bureau of Public Administration, and the name was retained until 1950, when a separate Business and Economics Library was established.
From the outset the library's mission was to be a specialized resource of ephemeral materials and government documents on American politics and public policy. Fulfilling this mission involved collection building practices that most libraries shunned as too bothersome--ferreting out publications of agencies and organizations that could not be found in book stores or ordered from vendors. It also involved specialized cataloging and indexing that most libraries preferred not to do--fully cataloging everything, even the smallest pamphlet, and indexing otherwise hard-to-find articles from journals and newsletters, and making the indexing available in library catalogs. Although a topical, current interest collection would have been easier to manage, it became settled library policy to retain almost everything for its permanent research value.
A glance at the library stacks, now housing well over 400,000 items, leaves no doubt that a unique and precious collection has evolved over the years. There are books, but they are vastly outnumbered. What greets the viewer is shelf after shelf of pamphlet boxes, stuffed with soft-cover reports, pamphlets and periodicals of varying size and thickness.
The bureau as a specialized research library focused on the needs of public administration scholars was the vision of founding director Sam May. To realize this vision he worked tirelessly, involving himself in the details as well as the big picture. Details included the intricacies of classification schemes, subject headings, and day-to-day library operations. During the 1920s, under May's guidance, the library took the essential form and direction it retains today.
A six-year Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1930 revolutionized the bureau. The library became part of a mix of programs and services, resources were augmented, major new programs in research and training in public administration were added, and the publications program began in earnest. The library now had an on-site primary clientele of scholars addressing public policy issues of all sorts and attuned itself to their needs. The scholars reciprocated by alerting the library to interesting material to acquire, often donating the material themselves.
The bureau's reputation spread, and alumni of its research and training programs fanned out into public service. Government officials and community leaders became aware of the library as a potential home for special collections, and an ongoing practice of enriching the library with these materials began. This general state of affairs continued well into the 1960s.
In the 1970s the pace of change picked up. While the library had always served anyone with a need to use the collection, the library's clientele broadened. More and more students from a range of social science disciplines, as well as members of the general public, used the collection, and the number of on-site scholars diminished as the governor's office and the state legislature developed in-house research staffs.
Recognizing the value of the library's specialized cataloging, the G.K. Hall Company published the library?s subject catalog in book form, and the book catalog found its way into the collections of research libraries around the country. But library automation turned out to be the most telling harbinger of change. As the 1970s progressed it became increasingly clear that the library could not continue to function as an isolated special library. The future was networking and accessing information resources through automated systems.
In 1983, after adopting standard cataloging rules, the library joined the national online cataloging network known as OCLC, and the library?s catalog records began appearing in MELVYL, the university?s online public access catalog. These developments vastly increased the visibility of the library and its collection. In 1989 the library closed its card catalog, relying on online access for currently cataloged materials. The dilemma of retrospectively providing online access to the thousands of pre-automation catalog records remains.
The 1990s find the library caught up in the whirlwind of change brought about by the escalating revolution in information technology. The on-site collection continues to grow, most notably with gifts of important core collections of books on American political science and public policy. At the same time the library is becoming an electronic information center, accessing remote online databases, exploring the vast information resources of the Internet, and spearheading the development of the Institute's electronic infrastructure.
In the library today an information need may be met by consulting a printed publication, but it is just as likely to be met by consulting LEXIS/NEXIS, or one of the full-text files of the MELVYL system, or the contents of a CD-ROM disk at the library's public workstation. The Institute, now wired to the campus computer network, has its own local area network; staff communicate via electronic mail and share printers and software; and an Institute homepage is set for launching on the World Wide Web. The changes are dizzying, and staying abreast of them in ways that serve research and scholarship at the Institute is the library's key task in the years ahead.