On Display: Documenting the Library's History

The State Library’s 200th anniversary might have been in March, but the celebration of our history continues in April with items on display our Collection Spotlight case. The March 1926 issue of Library Journal featuring an image of the State Library remains on display and is joined by a selection of items from our 100-year anniversary in 1926, along with a staff favorite photograph. These items will be on view in our main reading room from March 31 through May 5.

On display is the invitation and program for the celebratory event held in honor of the Library’s 100th birthday on March 3, 1926. From these two items, we gain a sense of the formality of the event. The invitation was issued by members of the Board of Trustees and "requested the honor of your presence at exercises to be held in the House of Representatives." From the accompanying program, we know that these "exercises" were primarily speeches. The event was presided over by Senate President Hon. Wellington Wells, with remarks from Governor Alvan K. Fuller and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Honorable Nathan Matthews. The keynote address was given by Dr. Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard University Law School, on the topic of The State Library in Modern Society. In addition to these speeches, the program also notes that within the Library was an exhibition of books, medals, and pictures.

This event does not differ greatly from the event that we held on March 3, 2026 in the Library's main reading room. Our 200th birthday event included remarks by Governor Maura Healey, Secretary of Administration and Finance Matthew Gorzkowicz, Senate President Karen Spilka, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, and Library Trustees Rep. Kate Hogan, Michele Capone, and Robert Cerasoli, who also presided over the festivities. Guests at our event were encouraged to sign our guestbook with well wishes, and this book, along with promotional materials from all our March events, will be added to our institutional records. 

Rounding out our display this month is a photograph that is a favorite among staff members and has been reproduced in our new exhibit, The State of the Library: 200 Years of Serving the Commonwealth. The photograph shows librarians and patrons in our main reading room in 1912. There are a number of photographs in our institutional records that document the reading room, staff, and events, though they primarily date to the 1950s and onward. This is one of the few photographs from the early 1900s.

Highlighting items from our institutional archives allows us to share our history as we continue to celebrate our 200th year, but these items also help us to mark Preservation Week, which occurs April 26 through May 2. The theme this year is Is This Thing On? Preserving Memories and Creating Archives. Preservation Week encourages institutions and individuals to focus on measures that can be taken to ensure the longevity of collection items, much like library staff one hundred years ago saved materials from the 1926 celebrations to add to the Library’s institutional memory. In your own life, if you have saved birthday cards, yearbooks, photographs, journals, or a myriad of other personal items, then you are also working to preserve history and add to the collective memory of your family and community. For materials that you want to save long-term, be sure to house everything in archivally sound materials that are free of acid and lignin. You can find a selection of at-home preservation tips here and always reach out to special.collections@mass.gov with any preservation questions, we are happy to assist as you create and maintain your own personal archives!

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian

The State Library Turns 200: A New Exhibit and Collection Spotlight

We are excited to announce the opening of our new exhibit The State of Our Library: 200 Years of Serving the Commonwealth coinciding with our 200th birthday this month! As we celebrate this milestone, the exhibit showcases both the Library's impressive history and its current offerings. Using published documents, historical photographs and artifacts, and archival materials from the Library’s institutional records, the exhibit highlights our various services, resources, and technologies, as well as the changes and expansions to its physical space that have occurred over the last 200 years. 

Complementing our new exhibit is the 1856 edition of Ballou's Pictorial and a copy of Library Journal from March 1926, both on display this month in our Collection Spotlight case. Ballou’s Pictorial was a weekly periodical published in Boston from 1851 through 1859 (though up until 1855 it was published as Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion). We’ve written about this periodical in a previous blog post, but in a nutshell, it was full of interesting information to read or discuss, along with illustrations to examine. One of those illustrations is this full-page print of the “Interior View of the Massachusetts State Library” found in the May 31, 1856 issue. 

Illustration of the interior of the State Library
from Ballou's Pictorial, May 31, 1856

This image shows the Library, which at the time was only thirty years old, in its second location within the State House. Only one year prior, an addition to the building was completed that moved the Library to a central location and included two floors – a reading room and a balcony, as depicted in this image. The Library remained in this space for forty years, until another addition was completed in 1895 that moved the Library to its current location.

The same image was reproduced in the March 1, 1926 issue of Library Journal, a publication founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey (of Dewey Decimal fame) and still in existence today. Included in this issue is a feature on the State Library as it celebrated its 100th birthday. The article, titled “A Century of the Massachusetts State Library” gives information about the founding and a synopsis of the State Librarians up to 1926. The article ends with a note on the collections, stating “its collection of statute law is said to be unsurpassed except by that of the Library of Congress. Perhaps its most interesting original manuscript is that of Governor William Bradford’s “History of Plimoth Plantation,” otherwise known as “The Log of the Mayflower.” One hundred years after the publishing of this article, the Of Plimoth Plantation remains one of the treasures of our collection and we are excited to share that it will be on display during our upcoming Open House on March 25.

While Ballou’s Pictorial and Library Journal will only be on display in our Collection Spotlight case from March 2 through March 31, The State of Our Library is on view in the display cases outside of the Library through 2026. If these items piqued your interest in the State Library's history, there is even more to be found in the full exhibit, so be sure to visit us Monday through Friday from 9:00 to 5:00 to check it out, or click here to see the online version!

Elizabeth Roscio, Preservation Librarian

Exhibits Working Group

Library Classifications of Yore: Shurtleff’s Decimal System

Did you know that, before the Dewey Decimal System was invented in 1876 and widely adopted by libraries, there were other decimal-based library classification systems in place? One interesting system was developed by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, M.D., chairman of the State Library of Massachusetts trustees in the mid-19th century. His self-designed, self-published classification system and manual titled A Decimal System for the Arrangement and Administration of Libraries (1856) was originally introduced into the Boston Public Library where it had been in “practical operation there since the summer of 1852.”

The classification system was heavily geared toward library administration as well as the physical arrangement of books in a library. It dictated that the alcoves and shelves should be arranged in multiples of ten, with each shelf labeled with a number. For example: “if a book is on shelf No. 208, it will be found on the 8th shelf of the 10th range, and (deducting 1 from the 2 in place of hundreds) of the 1st alcove.” Each book was also to be marked with the shelf number, as well as another number that represented its “true position on its shelf”—starting with 1 at the left. Further letters and numbers help denote multiple volumes in a set, multiple copies of a book, newly added books, etc.

 This system benefitted item retrieval and reshelving, but put both patrons and librarians at a disadvantage when wanting to conduct more precise searching and discovering of materials by subject matter on shelves. Card catalogs at this time were also simplistic in design, and were just beginning to give patrons an idea on what library collections had to offer. In 1857, as the State Library was changing to a new classification system, State Librarian George S. Boutwell, in the library’s 1857 annual report, acknowledges Shurtleff’s assistance during the process. Although the library did not adopt Shurtleff’s system, as Boutwell concedes that it was designed for “library apartments constructed with reference to the system, and for large circulating libraries”, he does praise its “simplicity, completeness and practicalness,” its potential to save on time and labor, and its ability to “promote convenience and despatch”. In this sense, Boutwell believed that the system would still be of great service to the library. It wasn’t until Melvil Dewey’s subject-based hierarchical decimal system was designed that the modern-day concept of library classification began to evolve and meet the needs of both the institutions and patrons alike.

Kaitlin Connolly

Reference Department