By 1938, Yale's library had grown to 2,748,000 volumes. They filled 80 miles of shelves, were card-catalogued in 10,000 drawers, required 200 attendants. This increase was typical of the larger U.S. university libraries, which for more than a century have roughly doubled the number of their volumes every 16 years. If Yale's collection continues to multiply at this pace, within another century it will contain 200,000,000 volumes, requiring 6,000 miles of shelves, eight acres of catalogue files. 6.000 cataloguers.
This geometric bogey was raised last week by Connecticut Wesleyan's Librarian Fremont Rider in...
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