Zoology Library

The Zoology Library was one of the many departmental libraries on campus over its first decades. This undated letter written by Professor Frank Lillie, gives a sense of the budgetary constraints and the needs and desires of the faculty of the 1910s and 20s for this department. Lillie requested a full-time staff member trained in biology to "regularly initiate purchases and check current literature" as well as "sufficient funds to bring the Library to the necessary completion and to purchase current publications". Nearly 60 years before the merger between the John Crerar Library and the University of Chicago, Lillie stated a "need [for] more thorough cooperation between the Biology Library and the John Crerar and Field Museum Libraries in estimating needs, avoiding needless overlap in purchases and cooperating in purchases of literature absent from all city libraries"