The compiled list was soon published in book form by Harvard University Press and became the industry standard.

"[The list] sold for years as 'the way' to start an undergraduate library," Cole says.

The Alumni Bulletin stated that Lamont contained duplicates of books in high demand at other University libraries. The example given was Hadley Cantril's The Invasion From Mars.

Many of the books were moved to Lamont from the Boylston Hall and Union reading rooms, which subsequently closed their doors.

Today, Lamont holds 200,000 titles. The vast majority of these are still duplicates of books in other libraries, Cole says, though the occasional unique edition or title will surface due to different buying schedules and unusual requests for course reading lists.

Those reading lists, Cole says, have expanded from a small and standard list of "Great Books" to focus more on primary sources. With this, she says, the library's collections have expanded.

With the "explosion of knowledge" after WWII, Cole says, "It seemed to us that they were reading more, there was more being published, and they were using more to teach."

But Cole says acquisitions work the other way as well. She says her staff expends an immense amount of time and energy on choosing new titles.

Cole explains that many times one of these new titles will show up on a course reading list one or two semesters later-a sure sign that her staff has done a good job.

The coming years will also continue the current trend of library overlap, Cole says.

"The growth of the need for interdisciplinary knowledge has been huge in the last 30 to 40 years," she says. "What people were expected to know at the end of an undergraduate course was changing."

The Fairer Sex

Pieter Greeff '58, one of the graduates with fonder memories of the library system, writes in the memory book, "The Lamont was well lit, intimate and blond while the Widener was stately, dignified and brunette."