Harvard College Library Order Department letters, 1881-1976

To facilitate the Harvard College Library's increased focus on acquisitions and collection development during the nineteenth century, functional departments and new staff positions were established in the Library, including the Order Department. This department was responsible for the acquisition of new books, periodicals, and other published material-- both foreign and domestic-- and achieved this function largely through ordering from the catalogs sent to the Library by book-selling firms, or through direct correspondence with book agents themselves. The department also ordered material based on the recommendations of staff from departmental and subject libraries, and sometimes, based on the requests of professors and students for personal research or interest.

The earliest records of the Order Department date from the early 1880s, with Assistant Librarians-- including William Hopkins Tillinghast (1887-1913), William Coolidge Lane (1887-1893), and Alfred Claghorn Potter (1904-1928)-- serving as head of the department during each of their tenures. By 1939, the Order Department had expanded to maintain a staff of eleven people in different subdivisions, including the Bibliographical Division and the Executive Division. The former division held responsibility until the approval of purchase by the Librarian; this division read through requests and catalogs, maintained up to date files, prevented purchase of duplicates, and prepared orders with as much information as possible to be sent to the Librarian for approval and the seller or agent for fulfillment. The Executive Division ensured that orders were obtained rapidly, efficiently, and economically after approval of purchase by deciding on the appropriate agent, checking the received material against the bill and the original order, assigning an appropriate Library fund to pay the bill, and giving pertinent information to the Cataloging Department, where new orders were sent to be integrated into the Library's collections.

Over the broad time span of this collection, the Order Department underwent numerous changes, shifting with modernized library processes and technologies. Namely, with the growth of the Harvard Library system (which includes 72 libraries), the functions of the department were distributed amongst various staff within specific libraries, and these smaller staff units are now largely called Acquisitions or Collection Development, rather than the Order Department. Still, the essential task of acquisition remains the same.