The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for academic libraries and library workers. In 1940, it also became the American Library Association’s (ALA) first formal division. But the road to unlocking division status was longer and more winding than you might imagine.
The journey started in 1889 when a group of 13 college librarians caucused at the ALA Annual Conference in St. Louis and recommended that an ALA group representing college libraries be formed. The following year, at the 1890 Annual Conference in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, 15 librarians representing most of the major colleges of the Eastern Seaboard, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brown, held the first meeting of the ALA College Library Section. The new section was a small, relatively informal discussion group with meetings that were mostly attended by administrators who could afford long-distance travel. The annual meetings of the section, the precursor to the current ACRL Conference, provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of papers on such topics as reference work, cataloging, departmental collections, union lists, and so on.
In 1897, the section acquired a new name, the College and Reference Library Section, to recognize the participation of reference librarians. By 1923, the section took a step toward becoming a more formal entity with the adoption of its own bylaws. The new bylaws established a Board of Management with three officers to conduct the business of the section between in-person meetings and provided for the levying of annual membership dues of 50 cents. During the 1920s, attendance at section meetings grew from 90 in 1923 to 240 in 1926 and peaked at 800 in 1928.
In the 1920s and 1930s, pressure began to build in the academic library profession for the creation of a stronger professional organization capable of undertaking a broad range of activities, programs, research, and publications. The occasion for a radical restructuring of the section came in the mid-1930s when ALA roundtables representing teachers, college librarians, and junior college librarians expressed the desire to affiliate with the College and Reference Library Section. In 1936, the chair of the section appointed a Committee on Reorganization to develop plans for restructuring. The final report of the committee in 1938 recommended the adoption of new bylaws that would transform the section into an Association of College and Reference Libraries with full autonomy over its own affairs. The new bylaws provided for the creation of subsections for college libraries, junior college libraries, teachers college libraries, university libraries, and other groups that might wish to affiliate.
The section approved the proposed bylaws in June 1938 and officially became the Association of College and Reference Libraries by the end of the year. The ALA Council responded by ratifying a new ALA constitution that made provision for the creation of self-governing divisions within ALA. The Association of College and Reference Libraries swiftly prepared a new constitution to meet the conditions for division status, and the ALA Council recognized the Association of College and Reference Libraries as ALA’s first division on May 31, 1940.
The Association of College and Reference Libraries embarked on this new life with six subsections: Agricultural Libraries Section, College Libraries Section, Junior College Libraries Section, Librarians of Teacher Training Institutions Section, Reference Libraries Section, and University Libraries Section. When the Reference Libraries Section departed to join ALA’s newly formed Library Reference Services Division in 1956, ACRL substituted “Research” for “Reference” in its name and became the now-familiar ACRL.
From these humble origins, ACRL has grown by leaps and bounds to represent all types of academic library workers and libraries—community and junior college, college, and university—as well as specialized research libraries. There have been many changes over the years, including the naming of ACRL’s first executive secretary in 1947 and the founding of the Choice publishing unit in 1963, but the division stays true to its founding mission by evolving and adapting to meet the needs of the academic library community.
This post is adapted from “ACRL and Choice History,” published on the ACRL website.
