Like the institutions of which they are a part, university and college libraries have embodied in their sense of grandeur the loftiest of American educational ideals. As neoclassical secular temples, gothic cathedrals, Norman castles, Victorian palaces or outsized utilitarian buildings, campus libraries have served as the rhetorical center of their institutions’ educational program. Organized around a grand reading room with vaulted ceilings, the library functions as the place at the college where quiet reflection should yield lofty thoughts. Usually funded at 5 percent of the educational institution’s overall budget, and named either for the most prominent private donors who have provided the building funds, or for the institution’s founders or presidents, the library is that part of the institution that is least controversial.

At least since the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century (and especially after the Second World War), the numbers of volumes and the miles of shelving have been prominent markers of the relative ranking of the various university and private/public research libraries. Since the Second World War, even the biggest buildings have proven insufficient for storing the entire collection. Many university and some college libraries, even after numerous building additions and the installation of compact moveable shelving, have resorted to building or sharing large warehouses off site.

The older East Coast universities, Harvard and Yale, and the two eastern research libraries, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have claimed the honors as the premier institutions of their kind. The Library of Congress is the largest of the world’s libraries; Harvard the largest university library collection. These institutions, as well as their smaller private counterparts in the East and Stanford, the University of California and the University of Chicago, also amassed large collections of rare books and manuscripts from Europe, especially after the First World War, when the economic conditions of postwar life induced the wholesale transfer of cultural capital from the old world to the new.

The shift of the center of the university and college library world to the Midwest has accelerated after the Second World War. The American Library Association, the leading national organization of librarians, is in Chicago, IL, as is the Center for Research Libraries, a shared repository for special materials from libraries around the country The three great libraries at the Universities of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana have been lavishly supported by their legislatures as a marker of state pride, rivaling their Eastern counterparts in size of collections. Michigan and Illinois house the country’s premier library schools, having assumed that mantle from the private institutions, the University of Chicago, which closed its library school in the mid-1980s as did Columbia University in the mid-1990s.

But it is not just the massive buildings, the great size of collections, measured for more than one hundred libraries in the millions of units—they are members of a group of large libraries known as the Association of Research Libraries, which maintains statistics on relative size of collections, budgets and staffs—that distinguishes American university and college libraries. Unlike the European models from which they have sprung, the campus libraries developed a service component that, when successful, merges the ideals of the institution with the practice of learning. Professional librarians, trained by the country’s library schools, have made it a practice to humanize the huge scale of libraries and the information they contain for the students, faculty and researchers who use them.

The relationship between the individual librarians and their patrons, facilitated by bibliographic instruction, the creation of step-by-step guides to the use of the collections and services and the cataloging of materials into subject-specific open-shelf systems has distinguished American library practice for at least a century Using rubrics developed by Melville Dewey—the Dewey Decimal System—and the Library of Congress’ Classification and subjectheadings systems, the physical organization of materials by subject has been the hallmark of the American library.

Electronic information technology came later to the university and college library than it did to the general US economy but it has profoundly affected research libraries.

Sharing cataloging information was the first step: the United States was the first place where a standardized record format, the MARC (Machine-readable cataloging record) format, developed by the Library of Congress in the 1960s, took hold. This prepared the university and college library community to take advantage of the Internet, through the shared bibliographic utilities of OCLC (Online (first Ohio) Cataloging Library Center), the largest of its type in the world, and RLIN (the Research Libraries Information Network). The technological revolution of the 1990s permitted educational institutions to extend their walls outward through off-site access to research and undergraduate collections. This change has been felt most profoundly at the public universities, which have reached out to new populations through distance-learning programs, made possible by electronic full-text library collections. The librarians at the private and public institutions of higher learning have been at the forefront of making the World Wide Web useable and useful to students throughout the country still applying the same principles of service and cataloging, large collections and ease of access.