The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

I. The University and Its Libraries 15
The Santa Barbara library began in 1891 as a collection of cookbooks
and carpentry manuals in the Anna S.C. Blake Manual Training
School. In fact, the "foundation book," which still occupies an honored
place in the Special Collections Department, was a guide to woodworking
and domestic training by the Swedish educational reformer Otto Salomon.
By 1912, it still had only 250 volumes, but after the move to the Riviera
campus steady growth began. William Wyles began donating his distinguished
collection of Civil War materials in the 20's, and by the time the school
became a part of the University in 1944 the library had some 40,000 volumes.
After transfer to the new campus site in 1954, the collections grew
rapidly, doubling in the four years after the school's designation as a
general campus.
If Santa Barbara's collection was limited at the beginning, Davis's
was even more so. In 1909, it consisted of a small collection of agricultural
bulletins, and by 1924, it still contained only 2,000 volumes.
With a new librarian that year, however, it began to grow, and by 1951
had reached 80,000 volumes. By the early 1960's, the collections had
grown to almost 300,000 volumes.
Riverside similarly was limited primarily to agricultural publications
in its earlier years. The library was organized formally in 1925,
but by the time the College of Letters and Science was established in
1951, it had only 14,102 volumes. By 1955, however, the collections
passed the 50,000-volume mark, and by 1959, when Riverside became a
general campus, numbered more than 100,000.
San Francisco's collection could lay claim to being perhaps older
than Berkeley's except that virtually all records were lost in the
great earthquake and fire of 1906. Certainly Dr. Toland's medical
college, which began in 1864, had a library, and the pharmacy and dentistry
schools associated with it after the college joined the University
in 1873, also contained rudimentary collections. Just before the
earthquake, the total collections numbered some 2,300 volumes. After
the 1906 holocaust, however, much of the medical program had to be
moved temporarily to Berkeley, and it was not until the new quarters
for the library were established in the Medical School building that
the collections began to grow. By 1944, there were 65,000 volumes,