Bancroft 1900, Bancroft 2000
For an upcoming issue of the Chronicle of the University of California the editors asked me to contrast The Bancroft Library of 1900 with The Bancroft Library today.
The university bought The Bancroft Library, primarily at the instigation of professor of history Henry Morse Stephens, in the fall of 1905 for $250,000, of which Hubert Howe Bancroft himself provided $100,000 as a gift. Stephens argued that the history faculty needed primary source materials not only to do their own research but also in order to train graduate students in historical methodology.
Still in San Francisco during the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, the collection was the only one of San Francisco's major libraries to survive. Less than two weeks later President Benjamin Ide Wheeler ordered it moved to its still-unfinished new home.Although Stephens estimated that Bancroft would need an annual operations budget of $10,000, the Regents initially provided just $900. To raise the rest Stephens and Wheeler organized the Academy of Pacific Coast History, whose fifteen Council members, all leading figures in San Francisco society and business, including William B. Bourn, William H. Crocker, Phoebe Hearst, James K. Moffitt, and Sigmund Stern, pledged $500 per year toward the library's support. Bancroft's own sons continued to keep a proprietary eye out as well, commissioning a portrait bust of their father from New York sculptor Johannes S. Gelert (1852-1923).
With the acquisition of The Bancroft Library the university took one of its first steps to becoming a major center of scholarly research. The 50,000 volumes of 1905 have grown to almost 500,000 printed books, 35,000 linear feet of manuscript and archival collections, some three million pictorial items, and 21,000 maps. The budget has increased from less than $10,000 per year to $5.34 million. The two staff members (Frederick J. Teggart and Porter Garnett) and three students who tackled the Herculean job of cataloging the library in 1906 have grown to eighty staff members and forty student assistants. The facilities housing Bancroft have expanded commensurately, from the attic of California Hall in 1906 to the Doe Library Annex in 1950, supplemented almost from the beginning with off-site storage, initially under the bleachers at Edwards Field on campus, today in the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond.
The scope of Bancroft's collections has increased, dramatically, with the addition of the University Archives (1963), the Regional Oral History Office (1965), the Library's Special Collections and the Mark Twain Papers and Project (1970), and the History of Science and Technology Program (1973). The addition of Special Collections fundamentally changed Bancroft from a library specializing in the history of the American West into one of the great primary source libraries in the country, with superb collections ranging from Greco-Roman antiquity—the Tebtunis Papyri—to medieval manuscripts, incunabula, rare books and fine printing, and modern literary manuscripts.
At the beginning, access to Bancroft was rigidly controlled. Even faculty members had to have a reader's ticket authorized by Stephens, and undergraduates were excluded. Today 40% of Bancroft's users are Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students.
The similarities between 1906 and 2000 are just as striking if not so obvious. Originally the Regents funded less than 10% of Bancroft's budget. The Regents' share of Bancroft's budget has expanded from just under 10% to about 32%; but Bancroft still depends on private giving in the form of endowment income and gifts from the Friends of The Bancroft Library for almost half of its budget. The size of the staff is still inadequate for Bancroft's needs, particularly with regard to processing and making available the large backlog—in excess of 10,000 linear feet—of unarranged manuscript and archival collections. In 1906 the attic of California Hall, was utterly unsuited for storage of rare materials; today the Doe Library Annex space is still inadequate, even taking into account offsite storage, and, even worse, it is at serious risk in the event of a major earthquake.
Our technical service staff use the most up-to-date information technology, following exactly the same strategy as Bancroft and the early Berkeley librarians. In Bancroft's case it was the steam-powered printing press that made it possible to scatter thousands of copies of Bancroft's Works throughout California and the West. Today we have begun systematically to take advantage of state-of-the-art information technology to make our collections better known and more accessible. The first step was the retrospective conversion of the card file, the lineal descendant of the catalog prepared by Teggart and Garnett, into an online catalog. The second step was the conversion of the inventories for archival and manuscript collections into machinereadable form. The third step is the digitization of the collections themselves and their dissemination on the World Wide Web.
And one more similarity: the Bancrofts continue to keep a proprietary eye on the library. In 1999 the family of Paul Bancroft III, Hubert Howe Bancroft's great-grandson, donated Bancroft's original roll-top desk to the library; and it now stands proudly in the director's office, right next to the bookshelf containing Bancroft's Works.
Volume 117
Fall 2000
Table of Contents
Acquiring the Nine-Millionth Book
From the Director: Bancroft 1900, Bancroft 2000
Cal Day and the Friends Annual Meeting
Thanks For the Memories: Photograph Albums and Historical Images
Who Was "G.G., Chief of Ordnance"?
A Peek at the New Edition of Huckleberry Finn
A ROHO Project: The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco
Nuts and Bolts: Creating a Bancroft Exhibition
Kudos for the Mark Twain Exhibit Catalogue
Jim Holliday Receives Hubert Howe Bancroft Award
GIFTS TO THE BANCROFT LIBRARY July 1, 1999 through June 30, 2000
