Elihu Burritt Library

The Papers of Herbert David Welte, 1898-1986
by Frank Gagliardi

Herbert Welte arrived in New Britain with his wife Aletha in 1929 to begin his duties as principal of the State Normal School. A native of Nebraska, Herbert Welte was 31 years old, with a recent doctorate from the University of Iowa and the father of a baby son. For the next 39 years, Dr. Welte would guide this institution from a Normal School, to Teachers College of Connecticut, and finally, Central Connecticut State College. He would live to see his beloved school achieve university status under his successor Dr. F. Don James.

Dr. Welte’s tenure as head of this institution covered a dramatic period in American history. He guided the school through the Depression years, followed by World War II, and finally, oversaw the explosive growth of the institution in response to the postwar baby boom.

A year after he became president, Dr. F. Don James contacted Dr. Jesse B. Johnson, a professor nearing retirement from the Department of Social Science. In a letter dated June 24, 1969, President James asked Dr. Johnson if he would be interested in organizing the papers of Dr. Welte. For two years, 1970-1972, Dr. Johnson worked on this project. The guide to the five file cases of Welte papers has been added to the library’s website under Special Collections. The URL is for the index is: http://library.ccsu.edu/lib/archives/history/WelteIndex.pdf. This index only covers the period 1929 through 1960. The remainder of the records, which span 1961-68, were kept in the Administration building so they could be consulted by Dr. James and continue to be stored in Davidson Hall.

In addition to the index, there are additional resources that the researcher may use to understand Dr. Welte, his achievements and this period in higher education. With the exception of newspaper articles, the only biography of H.D. Welte is Professor Anthony R. Cannella’s short but excellent The Public Vision of Herbert D. Welte, New Britain, 1988. Additional sources include the Central Recorder for the period 1931-1968 as well as the records of the Faculty Council (predecessor of the Faculty Senate) from 1943-1959, which provide a detailed record of major decisions made during this period. While several years of records remain in storage, the library does have Dr. Welte’s annual reports, 1930-1968 as well as the records of faculty meetings, 1939-1967.

The lobby of Welte Auditorium contains two large exhibition cases containing photographs, publications and other memorabilia related to Herbert Welte’s life and career. Richard Harris, Dr. Welte’s son-in-law, generously provided the funding to frame the many materials in these two cases. After Dr. Welte’s death in 1986, his family donated photograph albums, his yearbooks and materials relating to his retirement.

To underline the dramatic changes which had taken place under Herbert Welte’s leadership, Dr. Cannella on page 15 of The Public Vision of Herbert D. Welte, 1988, reported: “President Welte’s administration had inherited a two year teacher training school, with two handsome but over crowded buildings on 24 acres, 286 students and 18 faculty members. When he retired nearly four decades later, he left a multifaceted college with 20 buildings on more than 100 acres, approximately 5,000 full-time undergraduates and some 400 faculty members."

Interlibrary Loan Demystified - Part Two Interlibrary Loan Articles Delivered to Your Desktop by Kimberly Farrington Interlibrary Loan takes time. Journal articles are faster to get than books, and they are easier to ship. Up until the early 1990s there were only two delivery methods available to Interlibrary Loan staff: U.S. Mail and faxing. U.S. Mail can take up to two weeks and slows the delivery process. Articles received through this method were sent to faculty through Intercampus Mail to their offices. Since faculty are not always on campus during vacation periods, this method could potentially require a special trip to campus to pick up their material. If the faculty needed to order both books and articles, they would be coming to campus anyway; however, if they were requesting articles only, it could have resulted in a wasted trip.
Articles shipped by fax arrive quickly, but the quality of the article is degraded due to photocopying and the subsequent fax transmittal process. In the early 1990s, delivery of articles was available through FTP (file transfer protocol). This was a time-consuming process and even though it was generally considered faster, it was not widely used. During this time, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) developed software based on FTP that allowed ILL staff to quickly scan and deliver quality articles over the Internet. This transfer required both the lending and borrowing ILL departments to run the Ariel® software. When scanned directly from the journal, the quality is usually better than a photocopy or fax. Once the article arrived, it would be printed and mailed to the faculty member’s office or the student would pick it up in the library. By the mid-1990s, ILL staff tried to various ways to make it more efficient for patrons to receive their journal articles. Thus, the trend started toward the desktop delivery of articles. The options were either emailing the article as an attachment or posting the document to the Web. At the time, there were a few commercial or Open Source software applications available, but this prompted many libraries to create similar software in-house. Burritt Library used a homegrown document delivery system from late 1999 to early 2001. When this was no longer viable, we switched to using Prospero, an open source software application developed by the Prior Health Sciences Library at Ohio State University, whose primary advantage was its ability to work in conjunction with Ariel. The software was free and customizable to fit each specific library’s needs. Prospero was in use at Burritt Library from the spring of 2002 until 2003.
In the summer of 2003, the ILL office computers were upgraded, enabling us to upgrade to the newest version of Ariel®. This version had the Web-based document delivery software integrated. This upgrade simplified our lives since it eliminated several time-consuming steps in the delivery process. For the first few weeks, we continued the delivery of articles as email attachments. However, once software was set up we began sending the patrons links to their articles on the web.	The Electronic Document Delivery login screen
Although patrons were curious about the format change, they soon recognized the benefits over the former delivery method. Attachments take up a lot of valuable space in email accounts. If patrons were doing heavy research and had many documents arriving, the email accounts had to be monitored closely otherwise we received bounce back messages that the mailboxes were full. Dealing with these problems is time-consuming, which cuts down our efficiency. By sending the patron an email message containing a link to the item with a unique username and password, the item is available from our server for five viewings or two weeks from the date it is processed. The patrons using this service love the simplicity and ease of it, which is borne out by the surge in use. In the five months of 2002 that web-based delivery was available, we sent 110 documents to our patrons. In July 2003-June 2004, we shipped over 780 documents electronically. If you want to try this service, next time you fill out an article request form select Electronic Delivery. If the document is delivered to us electronically, we will make it available to you via this method. For more information, contact the Interlibrary Loan office, 832-3408.