A. D. White hired George Lincoln Burr (1857-1938) as his personal librarian when he was only a sophomore at Cornell. Burr worked in that capacity and as White’s personal secretary, traveling across Europe, acquiring some of White’s most prized manuscripts and early imprints. He joined the University’s history faculty in 1889, and went on to become an eminent professor, and like White, a president of the American History Association. From the time of its opening until his death, Burr was the librarian of the President White Library. He assured that this library-within-a-library became what he pledged to make it at its opening: a “great living, growing historical workshop of the University.”