Faculty Profile

"Ask Mr. McNiff," words almost synonymous with the end of a Widener book hunt, are not heard as often as usual these days. The reason is simple: Philip J. McNiff is seldom around to be asked. The familiar Reading Room superintendent is spending most of his time getting ready for the opening of Lamont Library--selecting the books, planning the interior, figuring out the systems of open and closed reserves. In short, he is getting the chance to put his ideas about the "service nature" of a college library into effect.

Tall and just beginning to gray, McNiff at thirty-five has spent more time in libraries than many a bent and wrinkled European scholar, and if he has not studied all the time, he has at least kept himself well occupied. Back in 1933, the year he graduated from Boston College with his A.B. in Philosophy, he began the battle of the books in Newton. Public Library. Things are usually uneventful for a small town librarian, but McNiff never gave them time to get that way. Not content to sit in a branch library and philosophize, he took courses at Columbia and in 1940 was awarded a B.S. in library science. In the meantime he had earned a promotion to head of the cataloging department for the whole Newton system. But he still was unsatisfied, and in 1942 he abandoned Newton's security for Harvard's futurity and went to work in the reference department of Widener. His eye to the future seems not to have been short-sighted, for within a year's time he was named Superintendent of the Reading Room, a position blessed with headaches commensurate to its stature.

A mild, soft-spoken man with a wisp of a smile poking out from beneath his usually serious manner, Mr. McNiff manifests his seldom-called-on Gaelic wrath when he sees the handiwork of the margin marker or the page puller. He is quick to point out that such abuses are the work of the determined minority, for "most of the boys are good lads." While needless rule infractions set poorly with him, he takes no stock in rules for their own sake. Instead, service for everyone is the watchword. Thus books have gone out for more than twelve hours whenever possible, and many a Harvardevens resident has sat at home reading Hobbes' "Leviathan" when under the rules of the pre-McNiff era he might as well have been running for a late train.

Despite conscientious attention to his job, McNiff has done graduate work in philosophy and political economy,--"but no more courses in library science, thank God." All the same he remains active in the American Library Club. As a versatile man with an air of competence and a flair for originality, he looks toward what is to be in Lamont. If the service in Widener has been unsatisfactory to students, it has been more so to Mr. McNiff. The eyes of Widener look to the snowy girders of Lamont,--"Ah, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!"