The Library Collection at City College: When Mrs. Sage endowed the Russell Sage Foundation with $50,000 and it was chartered by the State of New York on April 11, 1907, there was a provision stating: “It shall be within the purposes of said corporation to use any means to that end which from time to time shall seem expedient to its members or trustees, including research, publication, education, the establishment and maintenance of charitable or benevolent activities, agencies, or institutions already established.”

In order to become “a center of information,” the Foundation needed access to a library collection. This need was met by the library of the Charity Organization Society established in 1882, later transferred to the Foundation in 1912. The library was housed on the top floor of the Foundation’s headquarters building. “One of the Foundation’s most useful activities is a library open to the public, especially equipped to furnish information on social problems and social work,” reads an article in World’s Health 1926, noting that the Library accommodated an average of 21,000 readers yearly in its reading rooms. The collection was well known to social scientists and social workers.

In September 1945, an informal survey of the Library, known as the Russell Sage Library Rice Report, was undertaken. Its chief findings were that the Library was understaffed and had insufficient space. Possible solutions to the space problem included moving the library to a new building or expanding to other floors. When the Foundation moved its headquarters in the summer of 1949, it was unable to maintain the library due to the high cost of maintaining the books, pamphlets, reference volumes and periodicals. The Foundation moved on to its Park Avenue location and an Advisory Committee on the Disposition of Materials in the Russell Sage Foundation Library was created to decide on the future of the collection.

Only five of the 44 institutions that inquired about the collection requested to maintain it in its entirety. The Committee decided that the main criteria for deciding upon a library be that the collection remain intact; that it remain in New York City and be available to past clientele; and that the library would maintain its subscriptions and memberships. Given these criteria, the Committee, which included City College’s Chief Librarian, Jerome K. Wilcox, could only choose between two New York City schools: The City College of New York and New York University. A working collection was donated to the New York School of Social Work, now the Columbia University School of Social Work, whose students used the Russell Sage Foundation Library most actively. The remainder of the collection, it was decided, would go to The City College of New York. City College’s half is “40,000 volumes and 100,000 pamphlets and reports” and includes the annual reports of various institutions, such as settlement houses, as well as works on “child welfare, city and regional planning, housing and industrial relations, labor, penology, public welfare and social insurance.”

When the gift was received, City College President Harry N. Wright announced, “The collection will be of immediate use to the Social Research Laboratory and the Community Service Program of the College’s Sociology and Anthropology Department and to graduate students in Education. For the future, it strengthens the projected development of graduate work in the social studies.”

The collection was maintained by Felicia Fuss, assistant reference librarian of the Russell Sage Foundation, who joined the City College Library staff. Ms. Fuss answered reference inquiries related to this material in the original Morris R. Cohen Library Social Sciences Reading Room in Army Hall, maintaining serial subscriptions to the titles in this collection until her retirement in 1963. This collection was incorporated within the Division of Archives and Special Collections when the Library moved into the present Morris R. Cohen Library in 1982. Some of the collection has been cataloged and is now accessible through the CUNY Libraries online catalog, CUNY+, while access to the remainder of the material is provided by the card catalogue in the Cohen Library Archives Reading Room.