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27 - The libraries of the ancient universities to the 1960s

from Part Five - The Spirit of Enquiry: Higher Education and Libraries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Peter Hoare
Edited by
Alistair Black  and
Peter Hoare
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Summary

Introduction

By the mid-nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge had lost their age-old monopoly of higher education in England and Wales, with the founding of universities in London (1826) and Durham (1833), and on a smaller scale at St David's College in Lampeter (1827). Further competition followed with the establishment of the Civic universities later in the century and further expansion of higher education in the twentieth century, but Oxford and Cambridge continued to dominate the library scene as well as the academic world, at least in size and richness, and in popular perception. (Surprisingly, however, they play only a small part in the two most influential library reports at the end of our period: the University Grants Committee's Report of the Committee on Libraries (1967) (the Parry Report), and the Report of the National Libraries Committee (1969) (the Dainton Report).)

The existence of a number of other universities in Scotland and Ireland, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, must not be overlooked, since they share some characteristics of their English counterparts, including the impact of new foundations. The four (or five) ancient Scottish universities at St Andrews (founded 1411), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495/1593) and Edinburgh (1584) came to face competition, though rarely in library terms, from professional colleges and younger institutions such as Anderson's Institution in Glasgow (1796). In Ireland Trinity College Dublin was established as a Protestant bulwark by Queen Elizabeth I in 1599; the non-denominational Queen's Colleges founded in 1845 and the Catholic University of Ireland of 1854 had developed by the early twentieth century into the federal National University of Ireland and the independent Queen's University in Belfast.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , pp. 321 - 344
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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