0.5 Chapter three: professionalization and postwar expansion, 192  (Page 13/13)

Beekman may have claimed that this was just his personal opinion, but because he was the president, it was taken seriously. Not long after this speech, in 1955, the Society joined forces with the Extension Division of the School of General Stud­ies at City College of New York to offer a survey course in American art that would be taught at the Society. The class was to meet on Saturday mornings at 10:00 A.M. Unfortunately, the class was undersubscribed and was canceled. Beekman retired from the presidency later that year, and his idea for an affiliation with a university was retired with him. The possibility of an affiliation with an institution of higher learning would not be seriously pursued again until the late 1980s.

Another fundamental problem that remained hidden during this era of con­fidence and expansion was the need to gain professional control of the collections. As was mentioned previously, gifts were accepted and acquisitions made with very little regard for either the Society's mission or the comparative strengths or weak­nesses of the collections. In terms of cataloging these accessions, it was all the Society could do to keep pace with the annual inflow. Virtually nothing was done about the cataloging backlog.

By the latter part of the 1950s, the long-term impact of the lack of a collec­tions policy was brought to the Society's attention, even though management took no immediate steps to resolve it. In 1956, the Society commissioned a study, car­ried out by Lawrence C. Wroth, the librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, asking for "a candid report of Wroth's personal views of our library, which we believe to be one of the greatest general American collections." The 1956 annual report did not discuss Wroth's findings, stating only that the report had been completed and was under study. That brief comment would prove to be the last direct reference to Wroth's report during Vail's tenure. Interestingly, though, in the same annual report, LeRoy Kimball, the Society's president, wrote: "We might remind ourselves that the Society is the second oldest historical soci­ety with a continuing existence in this country." He then discussed the Society's original constitution and broad statement of mission and said, "We have lived up to a large extent to these objects, possibly too well. There is perhaps a penalty for being first in some things."

It is no surprise that the Society's top leadership chose not to discuss Wroth's study in the annual reports. The study was highly critical of the library's huge cat­aloging backlog and its lack of attention to this area. In addition, Wroth criticized the Society for its "unchecked, uncritical accumulation of materials" and its lack of either a collections or an acquisitions policy.

Even though its conclusions were not publicly acknowledged, the study did seem to have an impact on management. As the 1950s (and Vail's tenure) drew to a close, the Society showed renewed concern for both proper cataloging and the need to focus its collections. In the 1958 annual report, James Heslin, the librar­ian, described the Society's new cataloging initiative: "This heralds the beginning of a concentrated effort to catalog all the material which is not, at present, so cat­aloged. We believe that this is a project of great importance in terms of the more efficient use of the resources of the library." In 1959, Vail wrote that a review of the Society's collecting policies had improved its gift and purchase routines. Fur­thermore, he expressed that "these changes are the result of our realization that other collection agencies have grown up since we were founded a century and a half ago when, for lack of other specialized libraries and museums, we had taken the whole world as our province."

As Vail prepared to step down, four years after the Wroth report, 49 years after the formal establishment of the New York Public Library's research collections, more than 75 years after the birth of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and 155 years after its own founding, the New-York Historical Society began to think about narrowing its broad reach.