Rutgers University. Office of University Librarian

Born out of a small collection of theology books beginning the late eighteenth century, the Rutgers University Libraries have grown to comprise twenty-four libraries, collections, and reading rooms holding over 2.4 million books, 640,000 bound periodicals, 4 million government documents, and 5 million manuscripts. This growth can be attributed to a number of people, not the least of whom includes Donald F. Cameron.

The transition began in 1944, when Donald Cameron assumed the role of university librarian, succeeding the retiring George Osborne. At that time, the University Library's collection, housed in the Voorhees Library, numbered approximately 400,000 volumes. It had long been recognized that the collection, the staff, and the library building itself would need to be expanded to sufficiently provide for Rutgers' growing community. As University historian Richard P. McCormick wrote in 1966: "Adequate for the purposes of undergraduate instruction, the library was housed in a building that had long since become crowded to capacity and was handicapped by inadequate staff and a minuscule book fund. The growing emphasis on graduate instruction and research would require facilities and resources vastly larger than those available." (1) These were the challenges Donald Cameron took on during his twenty-two year tenure as university librarian.

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