1815
In a letter to President John T. Kirkland, Librarian Andrews Norton advocated for both a general collection of “common books for circulation among the students” and a collection “where valuable and rare books are deposited for preservation.” Norton recommended purchasing lower-quality editions for regular use by students, who sometimes damaged or made marks in the books. He understood the mission of the library to be two-fold: preserving books and benefiting students. Norton believed that these goals could be accomplished by having two distinct libraries.18
1815
With the commons and chapel transferred from Harvard Hall to University Hall, the first floor of Harvard Hall was devoted to classrooms and laboratories. The library now occupied the entire second floor.19
1818
The Harvard Library was under-funded and therefore unable to purchase many books during this period. Israel Thorndike donated the Ebeling collection of maps and Americana, one of the most valuable gifts the library had yet received.20
1822
Joseph Green Cogswell, briefly Librarian of Harvard, questioned whether the library’s priority should really be to provide books to undergraduates. He would have preferred to build a collection for scholars, and he wrote in a letter to the Harvard Corporation that “no library book should be allowed to be used as a class book under any circumstances, such a use being wholly inconsistent with its proper preservation.”21
1820s-1830s
President Josiah Quincy repeatedly expressed concern about the vulnerability of the library to fire due to its proximity to Hollis Hall, a residential building in which students often kept fires. Student revolts in the 1830s resulted in bonfires, explosions, and vandalism, all of which posed a threat to irreplaceable collections. Quincy referred to the fire of 1764 as precedent and hoped that “friends of the University,” in the private sector or in the government, would help fund the construction of a new building and prevent the destruction of irreplaceable collections.22
18 Metcalf, “The Undergraduate and the Harvard Library, 1765-1877,” 32-35.
19 Bunting, Harvard: An Architectural History, 32.
20 Potter and Bolton, The Librarians of Harvard College, 35; Carpenter, The First 350 Years of the Harvard University Library, 54-55.
21 Metcalf, “The Undergraduate and the Harvard Library, 1765-1877,” 37.
22 See Josiah Quincy’s annual reports of this period (in the Annual Report of the President of Harvard University to the Overseers on the state of the university). Quincy expresses particular concern between 1828 and 1833. See also Robert A. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, 1772-1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 148-162.