John Cotton Dana Library

The new $1.7 million library building of the Rutgers Newark College of Arts and Sciences will be named for John Cotton Dana, Dartmouth 1878, who was librarian of the Newark Public Library for 28 years and was responsible for many innovations that won him a national repuation in his field.

The John Cotton Dana Library is one of four buildings now under construction on the new state university campus site. It will have an ultimate capacity of 225,000 volumes.

Mr. Dana was librarian in Denver, Colo., and Springfield, Mass., before going to Newark in 1901. There he started the first business branch of a library in the country and he also organized neighborhood branch libraries throughout the city. In a special effort to reach Newark's large immigrant population he stocked books in Polish, Italian, Yiddish, German, and Russian. His early advocacy of open-shelf libraries made him an important force in library development throughout the nation.