0.6 Chapter four: the turning tide, 1960-1982

Chapter four: the turning tide, 1960-1982

The last of the early years, 1960-1970

On April 1, 1960, James J. Heslin was named director of the Society, a position he would hold for twenty-two years. His tenure can be divided into two distinct periods: a relatively prosperous period from 1960 to 1969, when investment re­turns were strong and inflation was relatively modest, and a much more difficult period from 1970 to 1982, when poor performance of the financial markets and limited public and private support constrained revenues at the same time that inflation drove up expenses. In addition to these external factors, the two periods are also identifiable by a change in the leadership of the Society's board of trustees. For most of the 1960s, Frederick B. Adams Jr. was president of the board; succeeding him was Robert G. Goelet.

Like his predecessors, Heslin was a librarian by training. After receiving his Ph.D. in American history from Boston University in 1952, Heslin received a mas­ter's degree in library service from Columbia University in 1954. Heslin then served as assistant director of libraries at the University of Buffalo, the position he held when he was hired by the Society to be its librarian in 1956. He was pro­moted to assistant, then associate director of the Society between 1956 and 1960. Because Heslin had been Vail's deputy, the transition to new leadership was smooth and relatively uneventful. Not surprisingly, the issues that emerged toward the end of Vail's tenure—acquisitions policy and cataloging—dominated Heslin's early years in office.

In his first annual report as director and librarian in 1960, Heslin quoted a Society librarian's report originally published in the Society's Proceedings in 1843: "The Librarian would now urge upon the Society, as the first object of atten­tion, the preparation of a new and methodical catalog of the whole collection. The library, although generally in excellent preservation, and so far as mere arrangements are concerned, conveniently dispersed, is almost inaccessible to gen­eral use from the want of one." Bringing the argument up-to-date, Heslin con­tinued: "It is impossible to pursue our acquisitions with any certainty unless we possess the means of regular periodical examination" of the collections, a process "only afforded by a catalog." He dutifully reported progress on the catalog in annual reports from the early 1960s, noting that "the importance of the catalog was second only to the richness of the collections themselves."

In the January 1962 Quarterly, Heslin wrote an article titled "Library Acqui­sition Policy of The New-York Historical Society." The article reviewed briefly the history of the Society's collections policies and pointed out precedents for nar­rowing the scope of the collections. As examples, Heslin referred to the Society's extensive collection of natural history specimens, which were donated to the Lyceum of Natural History in 1829, and the Society's collection of Egyptian antiquities, which was sold to the Brooklyn Museum in the 1930s.