BAKER LIBRARY IS MONUMENT OF TWO DECADES GROWTH

The following article has been written for the Crimson by Dr. A. H. Cole, administrative curator of the Graduate School of Business Administration.

Baker Library may unquestionably be regarded as one of the outstanding collections in the field of business and economics. Its possessions are already large; its scope is wide: and it has begun to acquire a flavor of its own--a feature which of itself indicates approaching maturity. This collection has been brought together in the last twenty years, starting from practically nothing. Its major development is a lasting contribution by Mr. Charles C. Eaton to the enrichment of the Harvard School of Business Administration--a contribution which is the more notable by reason of the fact that the Librarian has been confronted for the greater part of this period with the fact of relatively meager funds.

The hundred thousand volumes, chiefly monographs and bound periodicals, provide an excellent working library for the student of present-day business or the investigator into business history. For the use of the former, provision is made--especially in the Baker Room of the Library--for the acquisition of the better sources of current information on finance, commodity movement, and the like, whether such material be of governmental or private origin. The Library believes its primary obligation that of creating and maintaining this assembly of reference data on contemporary business activity.

Baker Library would also aim to become a treasure house of information on business that is past. To this purpose the Aldrich Room, the corporation collection, and the original document division, are severally devoted. The Aldrich Room, founded on the collection of finance material assembled by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, forms the center for the provision of material on banking, finance, and the tariff, covering both the distant and recent past; while it also serves as a reading room to those who would study at leisure the development of the United States in these lines.

The corporation collection constitutes an assembly of original printed material relating to the multitude of business corporations of the country. While it contains the most recent material upon the business life of the country, such as the current annual reports of American corporations, it also aims to supply data upon the history of such institutions through the collection of older printed documents--annual reports, and the like--relating to the evolution of present-day business units.

Finally, the original documents, dismortgages, leases, corporation histories vision provides source material in the form of account books, letter books and other private unprinted papers which permit the student to examine in detail the experience of individual business enterprises of earlier years. Here are the documents relating to early cotton mills to banks to merchandising establishments, and the like--material which permits the investigator to penetrate even more deeply than he could through printed documents into the history of American industry.INTERIOR VIEW OF BAKER LIBRARY