What of visiting scholars? "We don't want to handicap scholarship," Metcalf has maintained, "but the University is not in a position to operate a free public library." Yet the Yale PhD. candidate can use Widner for nothing. While the Harvard graduate student must pay $200 for almost identical privileges.

Will There Still Be Books?

Most important, which fields of study will the University emphasize? Acquisition funds are currently $60,000 short of what is needed to keep existing collections up to date. Buck will have to decide which fields to slight, which fields to leave these problems largely to the University. He merely attempted to give the University the service it wanted as it wanted it. Buck will come to his office with convictions on these problem, for he has been an educator and a scholar rather than a public servant. In this area, he may indeed find that real conflict replaces the prejudices which hampered Metcalf.

Prediction is difficult, but at present the library appears faced with two possibilities. Either the changing economic climate will make possible acquisitions, services and construction possible today, or the library will move towards interlibrary cooperation, abandoning its traditional independence.

Perhaps Buck's retirement will see a library characterized by catalogues of all the world's books, streamlined interlibrary loans, and a Northeastern regional library comparable to the Library of Congress. On the other hand, photostating, microfilming, recording, and IBM cataloguing may have outdated the existing conception of a library. "Perhaps" Metcalf suggests, "we won't even have books in forty years."

Yet no matter what technical changes or administrative developments take place under Buck, he will still face the problem which Justin Winsor formulated 80 years ago, "How, on limited funds, to give as many people as possible as many books as possible with as little trouble as possible.