C. C. Williamson: A Record of Service to American Librarianship; Frank K. Walter in Retrospect; R. B. Downs to Illinois; John C. French of Johns Hopkins; Homer Halvorson to Johns Hopkins

ON JUNE 30, 1943, Charles Clarence Williamson brought to a close his active professional career, including seventeen years of work as director of libraries and dean of the School of Library Service at Columbia University. Dr . Williamson's life affords one of those examples, fortunately not rare among librarians, in which marked ability achieves expression along an avenue which is unusual and unforeseen. He appeared at one time to be destined for a life of college teaching, but his great contribution turned out to be the organizing and administering of libraries and of a library school. Born at Salem, Ohio, in 1877, Dr . Williamson spent his boyhood in a rural environment and his earliest professional years as a public school teacher. He secured his college education at Ohio Wesleyan University and at Western Reserve University, where in 1904 he received his bachelor's degree. Upon graduation he entered the University of Wisconsin as a candidate for the doctorate and at the close of two years transferred to Columbia University, which granted him in 1907, the degree of doctor of philosophy in economics. He taught economics and politics for four years thereafter at Bryn M a w r College. In 1911 he moved to New York and served successively as head of the Economics Division and of the Municipal Reference Branch of the N e w York Public Library, as statistician for the Americanization study of the Carnegie Corporation, again as chief of the Economics Division at the library, and finally as director of the Information Service of the Rockefeller Foundation. T h e last of these connections continued until 1926, when he assumed his responsibilities at Columbia University. Important as were Dr. Williamson's activities in the N e w York Public Library and in the offices of the foundations after coming to N e w York, they were but one part of the prelude to his major work. T h e other part was his examination of library schools in the United States, which was authorized by the Carnegie Corporation in 1919 and reported upon in his Training for Library Service in 1 9 2 3 . This accomplished, on a scale appropriate to library schools, the kind of thing which the surveys by Flexner, Mann, and Reed had done in the fields of medicine, engineering, and law respectively. It brought into the open the merits and weaknesses of the schools; and, although many of these already were familiar to librarians and to faculties, the findings focused attention on what needed correcting and on what outsiders expected of the schools. As a consequence it opened a new channel for the interest of the Carnegie Corporation in library service, challenged the American Library Association to exert an effective influence upon library schools, and led to a renovation in education for librarianship. T h e gifts of the Carnegie Corporation and the work of the A . L . A . Board of Education for Librarianship were the active forces in the process, but the Williamson report was the fulcrum.