The Perry Years, 1954 – 1961
7.3. Collections
M. Webb, past president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, presented the Library with a collection of over 400 books written by Africans and African-Americans along with a sum of £200 to be invested in order to purchase book additions to the collection. This collection was to be a memorial to the achievements of African people and would be known as the “Maurice Webb Collection of African and Negro books.”652 It was a noble idea but sadly the collection, since it was housed in the Main Library in the Memorial Tower building, would have been unavailable to some of the very people it was meant to inspire as black Africans were not, at this time, allowed to make use of the collections in either the Main or Commerce Libraries.653
Perry, together with the Dean of the Medical School, attended a meeting in Cape Town with representatives of the South African Medical Association. Arising from this meeting, the Medical Library became the recipient of an annual donation of £100 per annum from the South African Medical Association, in return for the “availability of the full facilities of the Medical Library to its members.”654
Donations were also received from the Ford Foundation as part of its $27,500 grant towards the Programme of Advanced Training in Social Science. The Foundation donated £1,350 in 1954 and the same amount again in 1955 to the Library for the
purchase of books to support the Programme. Monies from this grant were added to the library grants of the academic departments associated with the work of the Institute for Social Research. The 12 departments which benefited from the additional grant were:
Architecture, Bantu Studies, Commerce, Economics, Education, Educational Psychology, Geography, History, Law, Mathematics, Psychology and Sociology.655
the libraries topped 95,000 but the enforced duplication inherent in the University having to maintain two main university libraries “has meant that the Library has had to indulge in the luxury not only of duplicating textbooks, but also expensive reference works, sets of journals and law reports.”656 Perry found that the University of Natal collections were geared to serving the undergraduate rather than the scholar or researcher and were weak in a number of areas. He enlarged on this:
A very striking but less tangible general weakness of the collection lies in its utilitarian content, the feeling that most books have only found their way on to the shelves in answer to an immediate and pressing demand. This weakness reveals itself not only in the lack of surprises in the collection, but in the lack of the obvious, of the classic, which has not been purchased because it has not been specifically recommended for study.”657
To support his argument that students and scholars require access to a catholic collection of reading material he referred to the bibliographical notes in works by Pareto658 which indicated that the scholar had read widely.659 Interestingly, many years later De Jager, in an attempt to find out if there was a correlation between student academic performance and library use, concluded that a positive relationship did indeed exist between the use by students of books on the open shelves of the library (that is, books that had not been specifically recommended by lecturers) and academic achievement.660 Her findings vindicate Perry’s belief that a university library collection should be diffuse in order to provide sufficient support for scholarship.
The “utilitarian” nature of the collections is not surprising, given that the oldest library, the Main Library in Pietermaritzburg, had been in existence for only 33 years and the Main Library in Durban for 23 years. The collections of 1954 were not very far removed from the “class-room libraries housed for convenience in a central hall.”661 From
information he gleaned from interlibrary loans statistics, Perry considered that the
656 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1954, p. 1.
657 Ibid., p. 2.
658Vilfredo Pareto was professor of political economy at Lausanne in Switzerland. His writings are said to have laid the foundations of modern welfare economics. His famous work, The mind and society, is
considered to have anticipated the principles of facism. – The Cambridge encyclopedia, edited by D. Crystal, 2nd edition, London: BCA, 1994, p. 835.
659 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1954, p. 2-3.
660 K. de Jager, Library use and academic achievement, South African journal of library and information science, vol. 65, no. 1, March 1997, p. 27.
661 Natal University College, Report of the N.U.C. Library Committee (Pietermaritzburg) on Carnegie Corporation grant, [1935], unpublished.
Library had “fairly strong and representative collections”662 in social science,
engineering, geology, education, psychology, chemistry and architecture but the same statistics also revealed that there were too many incomplete runs of journals.663 As Perry stated, “The presence of good runs of journals in a library stimulates research and
scholarship, while their absence constitutes a severe handicap.”664 Hence the University Council eventually agreed in 1960 to increase the Library grant by ten shillings per student so that back issues of journals could be purchased.
“Eclectic purchasing” and the obtaining of private collections by purchase or gift were Perry’s remedies for enlarging the library collections.665 His aim was to build up the University Library’s collections and he set to work with a will. He made a considerable effort to supplement the Library’s annual book grant with donations, both monetary and in kind. The 1955 statistics showed that over 9,000 items were added to the Library in that year, of which only one quarter had been purchased with University funds.666 The lists of donations reported each year in the Annual report were never less than two pages. The Library was frequently the beneficiary of deceased estates such as the personal library of over 2,000 volumes bequeathed by Dr M. Palmer. Even the
withdrawal of the Indian High Commissioner’s Office from South Africa had a positive outcome for the University Library in the form of a donation of 50 volumes on various Indian subjects, including “Tendulkar’s eight-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi.”667 The Medical Library received numerous donations of books and journals from other university libraries and was the fortunate recipient of the entire library of the Natal Coastal Branch of the Medical Association of South Africa.668
The results of Perry’s energetic book collection policies were impressive. The 1961 statistical summaries reveal that, during the seven years of his tenure, the total book stock had increased considerably, from 95,000 to 162,767 volumes, an increase of 71%.
His efforts were not confined to additions to the collection. His institution of a weeding
662 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1954, p. 3.
663 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1957, p. 2.
664 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1960, p. 1.
665 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1954, p. 3.
666 The University Library, University of Natal gazette, vol. 3, no. 1, 1956, p. 5.
667 University of Natal Libraries, Annual report, 1954, p. 5.
668 University of Natal Library, Medical School Library Sub-Committee, Minutes of the meeting held on 2nd November, 1955, unpublished, p. 1
programme ensured that “out-of-date and misleading materials”669 which had been acquired by the Library by various means over the years were removed from the shelves, thus improving the usefulness of the collections.