Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Library

Northwestern University was founded in 1850; classes began in the building known as Old College, at Hinman and Davis Streets in Evanston, in 1855, with an enrollment of ten young men. During the summer of 1856, Northwestern's board of trustees allocated $1000 to create a library. Initially the library was directed by faculty members, and borrowing privileges were restricted to faculty. Professor William Godman, one of the two original faculty members (teaching Greek language and literature), was appointed the first librarian. Godman oversaw the refitting of a room on the third floor of Old College for a library, and also acquired the first books, which by June 1857 numbered 1977. Godman was succeeded in 1858 by Daniel Bonbright, professor of Latin. Over the next 12 years, under Bonbright and his successor, Louis Kistler, the library grew slowly; a title list prepared by the library's first recorded student assistant, Charles Bannister, in 1868, includes about 3000 volumes.

The arrival of the Greenleaf Collection (described below) in 1870 increased the size of Northwestern's library sevenfold and coincided with its relocation from increasingly cramped quarters in Old College to the third floor of the new University Hall, an imposing limestone structure that remains a Northwestern icon. The library's new space measured 70 by 20 feet and was filled within three years, foreshadowing the space problems that would always plague the university library. In the following years the collection continued to be developed aggressively. In addition to acquiring libraries from retiring or deceased faculty, significant expansion was made possible, in 1876, by the designation of the library as a depository of U.S. government publications. By 1894, close to one-third of the library's collections consisted of government publications.

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