great library . . . to illumine the homes of all the people.”[1] That such a library now stands in Chapel Hill is due in large part to his interest and help. As Chairman of the Trustees Committee on Building and Grounds, he was active in the 1920’s in the movement to secure appropriations by the state for the first unit of the building and again, in the same official capacity, was instrumental in approving plans for the enlargement which doubled its facilities in 1952. He provided an income for the support of the Library as a stipulation in his gift of the Carolina Inn to the University. He was charter member and first president of the Friends of the Library, an organization composed of alumni, faculty, and others interested in development of the Library. In recent years, he has extended the influence of the Library by financing publication of bibliographies.
An important event in the history of the Collection was the purchase of the Stephen B. Weeks Collection of Caroliniana in 1918. The Weeks Collection, comprising ten thousand books, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, and a few manuscripts, was recognized as the most complete body of material relating to the state at that time. Dr. Weeks, Class of 1886, may have received the germ of a collector’s zeal that directed his interest throughout life in meetings of the North Carolina Historical Society of which he was a member. In an enthusiastic account of his library, he traces his progress as a collector, beginning with the scrapbook method which he calls “the destructive stage,” passing through stamps, single issues of newspapers, and coming finally in 1884 to ownership of his first North Carolina book, Moore’s Pioneers of Methodism in Virginia and North Carolina, an important milestone for the state as his plan to build a great North Carolina collection became fixed at that point.[2] Acquisition of this library made the University a center of research on North Carolina and provided much material for regional research as well. Acquired at a time when collecting for the University was being accelerated by appointment of a special librarian for the North Carolina Collection, it became a model for future growth which followed its emphasis on ephemeral material of the present as well as the relics of the past. Pamphlets, bulletins, short-lived periodicals, newspapers, maps, state and federal documents, and books by local authors of little renown require the protection of an institutional library, or the care of some devoted bibliophile, from the time of their publication to escape destruction. A collection built on this plan approaches a complete depository of all local printing and provides a body of material on present conditions as well as a reservoir for historical research when the present
