0.4 Chapter two: the formative years, 1804-1920  (Page 5/8)

The lack of focused leadership during this period was due in part to a change in the distribution of responsibilities among professional and volunteer leader­ship at the Society. Because the Society was a membership organization, the posi­tion of its official leader, the librarian, was an elected office. Until the end of Moore's tenure, the elected librarian and the full-time professional working in the library were one and the same. For some unknown reason, William Kelby, who would have been Moore's natural successor to assume both posts, chose not to run for election as the librarian and remained the Society's assistant librarian. Kelby's reluctance to stand for election meant that for the first time, the society's chief ex­ecutive was a volunteer. The three librarians who succeeded Moore were all elected volunteers. To outsiders, the placement of responsibility for the library in the hands of a nonprofessional just as comparable institutions were becoming more profes­sionalized further undermined the Society's credibility.

Another development that cast the Society further outside the circle of pro­fessionalized libraries was its identification with the growth of patriotic and genealogical organizations. During the late 1800s, New York was a center of ge­nealogical activity. Kelby himself was the official examiner of membership applications for the Sons of the Revolution in the state of New York. The growth of genealogical organizations in New York City was at least partly in response to the changing ethnic makeup of the city. By 1890, fully 80 percent of New York City's population was either born abroad or first-generation American. Many "native" New Yorkers (who were in fact just descendants of earlier immigrants) began to feel that their "way of life" was threatened. With membership in an or­ganization to prove their descent from the city and country's founders, the old families could set themselves apart from the masses. Although it was natural that the Society's library, with its early collection of records and manuscripts, would be helpful in genealogical research, "it was unquestionably due to Kelby's par­ticular enthusiasm for the subject that. . . the Society became one of the city's chief centers of genealogical research."

The Society's movement away from the professional community and toward the amateur genealogists severely damaged its reputation. Whereas it had been highly regarded in the 1850s and 1860s, by the late nineteenth century, the Soci­ety was unknown to most New Yorkers. Those who were aware of it viewed it as a "quaint backwater of the city, serving not the historian (much less the interested amateur or inquirer) but a small circle of Knickerbocker families who descended from the founders."

Although the Society's reputation suffered under Kelby, its collections con­tinued to grow. By 1900, the library had amassed over one hundred thousand vol­umes. Unfortunately, the library's capacity to absorb these new materials was limited. Not only was the library's space overburdened, but the printed catalog listed only a quarter of the Society's book titles. Because it had chosen not to in­volve itself with the library associations, the Society was slow to adopt the tools available to manage its ever-increasing collection. For example, the shelving sys­tem, which had been adequate for a library of fifteen thousand tides, had become completely overwhelmed. Books were sometimes assigned to shelves based not on subject but on where they would fit.