Cornell's First University Librarian
Cornell’s first President, Andrew Dickson White, chose his friend Willard Fiske to become Cornell University’s first librarian. Fiske proved an ideal candidate for the role. He was not only a gifted linguist and astute bibliophile but also had served for seven years as assistant librarian to Joseph Green Cogswell at the Astor Library in New York City (now part of the New York Public Library). Cogswell, an early pioneer in many of the modern fundamentals of librarianship, influenced Fiske’s career and professional decisions at Cornell.
Together, Fiske and White guided the Cornell Library through its critical first stage. Fiske’s progressive ideas about library service drew on the European model of the reference library. Cornell may have been the first American university library intended for extensive use by undergraduates as well as by the faculty. At that time most libraries were open only one or two hours a day, just long enough for faculty to check out and return books. The Cornell Library was open nine hours a day, longer than any other library in the country, with five students in charge of the library and its reading room. Student assistants worked from one to four or more hours a day, earning fifteen cents per hour. The collection, however, did not circulate.
Cornell's First Library
When McGraw Hall opened in 1872, Willard Fiske supervised the library’s move from its temporary quarters in Morrill Hall. Cornell’s library would remain in McGraw Hall until 1891, when its first dedicated library building (now Uris Library) was built.
Fiske arrived in Ithaca to assume his new post in December 1868 and confronted a mountain of unorganized books. White had spent the previous two years building a core library collection for the new university, canvassing the bookshops of Europe and sending crates back to Ithaca. In the summer of 1868 White acquired 7,000 volumes from the library of Columbia University classics professor Charles Anthon, and a large library of philological books from Professor Franz Bopp of Berlin. One of Fiske’s first tasks was to move the books to the two middle rooms of Morrill Hall, and to classify and arrange them. According to the librarian’s first report to the Trustees in June 1869, the collection already comprised nearly 24,000 volumes. The growing library spent its first three years in Morrill Hall, moving to McGraw Hall when that building opened in 1872. The library remained in McGraw Hall until 1891, when Cornell’s first University Library building (now Uris Library) was built.
Library Bulletin
The first issue of the Cornell University Library Bulletin summarizes the activities and acquisitions resulting from the library’s first two decades of growth. Willard Fiske resigned his post as University Librarian in 1883, but his interest in the library continued. He corresponded regularly with his successor, George W. Harris, and made generous gifts to the library’s collections during his lifetime and through the bequest of his entire personal library.
Samuel May Collection
With the support and counsel of Andrew Dickson White, Fiske continued to acquire major scholarly collections, including the Franz Bopp philological library, the library of Goldwin Smith, the Kelly Collection on the history of mathematics, and the Samuel J. May Antislavery collection. Many of these collections contained valuable and scarce materials that remain the nucleus of Cornell’s rare book and manuscript collections today.
Once collections arrived, Fiske remained active in managing their growth and support. As this letter of 1874 shows, Fiske worked with leading nineteenth-century abolitionists to bring additional books and papers to Cornell to augment the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection.
Letter from Abolitionists. October 1, 1874.
Jared Sparks Collection
In 1872, Willard Fiske acquired for the library the Jared Sparks collection of American history. Sparks, a historian and former president of Harvard University, had developed a rich research collection on all aspects of American history. Highlights of the collection include papers gathered for work on his twelve-volume Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, and books on Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison, as well as hand-drawn Revolutionary-era maps.
Goldwin Smith Collection
This edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man came from the library of Goldwin Smith, which arrived at Cornell in March of 1869 in twelve shipping containers sent from Southampton, England. Goldwin Smith, noted English historian and journalist, had come to Cornell as a non-resident professor in 1868.