MOST of the problems the Library faces are straightforward: space, of course, is one; staff for the care and cataloguing of the collections is another; and the acquisition of new books is a third. Every institution, however, has similar problems. The Houghton--with an annual budget of about $750,000--is in a good position today because of its tremendous accumulation under the leadership of Jackson and Hofer over the past 25 years.

The library goes on collecting as fast as ever--building on its strengths and working on areas of weakness. In the late 1950's, for example, the library began collecting Oriental manuscripts, of which it had only a few. "There were opportunities, the prices weren't high, and there wasn't much competition," Hofer says. "It goes like that. We use our money well."

Its high quality does not, of course, allow the Houghton to be complacent; but it does allow it breathing space in which to ponder a more serious question that confronts it: that of its role within the University and, implicitly, the community. Many people have recently proposed that Harvard make greater efforts to involve the people of Cambridge in its intellectual life and, specifically, that it make the resources of its libraries more accessible to the public.

"We find this logical for big city institutions," Hofer says, "but less logical for a university institution, and still less logical for a rare books library such as ours, where we primarily want to serve scholars. We are essentially here for scholarship work, and we allow the public in to the degree that it is scholarly. The real value of this library is that these are source materials for the scholar who wants to get right down to the fundamentals: where did it all come from?"

Houghton, in other words, serves an international community. As many as half of the people who annually use the library have no connection with Harvard. To them, for a small charge, the Houghton readily makes its resources available.

"One of the functions of a university," Harvard President James B. Conant observed at the opening of the Houghton, "is to act as a guardian of the cultural riches of the past. Our libraries and museums serve only in part our own students and our staff. To a large measure they are of benefit to the much greater world of scholars.... We are the servants of a community that extends far beyond these academic walls -- our responsibilities transcend both the immediate aims of this institution of learning and the days in which we live."

Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Musuem in New York, has been making a big splash recently with his call for greater involvement of the public in the affairs of the art world. People at Harvard often talk of breaking down the barriers which have traditionally kept the University aloof from the life of the people of Cambridge. One must be careful, however, that in the process one does not dilute what Curator Bond has called "the raw material" of scholarship. One must be careful in building up a new community not to de-