0.5 Chapter three: professionalization and postwar expansion, 192  (Page 8/13)

With the assistant director now representing education, not the library, as had traditionally been the case, the Society's education initiatives became an area of increasing emphasis. In the annual report of 1946, the outgoing president of the Society said the Society hoped, even in the midst of a very difficult economic en­vironment, "to continue and to expand its efforts to make American history a vital part of the education and entertainment of the young people of our schools." Spe­cial programs brought thousands of elementary school students to the Society, and a traveling exhibit toured New York City high schools. The Society tracked and proudly reported the exposure it received from these initiatives; the annual report for 1946 noted that approximately eighty-six thousand students were introduced to the Society through the traveling exhibits during the course of the year.

The Society's expansion resulted in small deficits in 1951 and 1953. Under pressure to balance the budget, Vail reminded the board of trustees of the need for more income. He emphasized the need for funds for the purchase of new materials for the library, museum, and art gallery and pointed out that if the Society hoped to give "adequate service" to its "ever-increasing clientele," it "must have better salaries and more trained people."

Despite Vail's pleas, there is little evidence to suggest that significant efforts were made to develop new revenue sources. The Society remained almost exclu­sively dependent on investment income to fund its operations (see Figure 3.2). For example, although the education programs provided a clear public service, no effort was made to involve the city or state government in defraying the cost of these services. Neither was there any attempt to raise private contributed income.

The expansion of the education department complicated further the task of managing the Society. Already wrestling with the demands of coordinating the museum and library, the Society's management now had to fold a more aggressive public education program into its overall mission. From the annual reports of the late 1940s and early 1950s, it is not entirely clear that the leadership of the Soci­ety was comfortable with integrating these purposes. For example, at the same time that initiatives were under way to introduce thousands of schoolchildren to the library through tours run by the education director, Vail, at a meeting of New York City librarians in 1948, "called for the elimination of student and popular use of research libraries."

One possible reason that the public education program proved so appealing is that its success was easy to measure (by tracking, for example, how many stu­dents benefited from the Society's holdings). There seemed to be pressure, during this time, to provide quantitative measures of the Society's successes. During Vail's tenure, the Society's annual report began to include a statistical appendix that tracked many of the Society's services. It gave a wide variety of specific facts and figures about the Society, including such measures as the number of ele­mentary, intermediate, and high school students who toured the Society, the num­ber of readers who used the library, and the number of volumes requested from library staff. But statistical measures such as these do not fully convey the basic value and importance of a research library. In an attempt to quantify the library's essential output, the Society began to report the number of publications in which the author acknowledged the Society for its assistance. This number, reported annually from 1952 to 1975, averaged 60 publications per year. The year of the fewest acknowledgments was 1956, with 35, and the year with the most was 1975, with 108.