Harvard Library Methods.

Mr. W. C. Lane, librarian of the University, addressed the Modern Language Conference last evening on "Suggestions on the Use of the College Library." Mr. Lane said in part:

A library is at best a complicated piece of machinery, success in using which depends largely on the ingenuity of the student. To assist him, however, there are three helps,--classification of books on the shelves, a record or catalogue, and bibliographical works and assistance.

The fundamental idea in the classification of books in the stack of the Harvard Library is to place all the resources which are needed at one time by the student in the same place. Of course all the works on a subject cannot be brought together, but much can be done by collecting correlated matter. In this particular the classification is wholly different in Gore Hall from that of other libraries which divide the whole collection into fields--as history, philosophy, etc. The authors are grouped by centuries and then alphabetically. Elsewhere they are scattered. The treatment of biography is also much better in the Harvard Library than elsewhere, as the statesmen relating to the history of a certain country are placed with that history, instead of being grouped by themselves.

The catalogue is the second help. Some subjects are most easily followed up by turning to the shelves first, but with others it is better to use the catalogue, where everything about or by an author may be found under his name. The subject catalogue is almost unique, the only other system with a similar principle being that used by Yale. Elsewhere a "dictionary catalogue" is used. In the subject catalogue there are about five hundred main subjects under which are grouped minor subjects in the same general field. Thus the general subject "Languages" is divided into countries and these sub-divided again into grammars, histories of the different tongues, dialects, etc.

The Index, finally, makes this system easy and practicable, by showing how the minor are grouped under the major heads, and by a simple numerical method of referring to different drawers.