The Princeton Data

This compilation was my first introduction to what turned out to be what I have named The Gerould Statistics. This monograph was a bound set of typescript pages of data from a set of academic libraries from 1920/21 through 1943/44 and arranged by the name of the institution. Why 1919/20? That was the year that James Thayer Gerould (1872-1951) moved from the University of Minnesota to Princeton University. He retired in 1938 and apparently Lawrence Heyl continued his work in collecting these data and then was involved in reorganizing and collecting the data for this publication. During my work on the Gerould Statistics, I keyed these data so here they are. I also discussed problems with this collection in The Gerould Statistics (Washington, ARL, 1987) on pages 12-23, along with the Purdue data. This discussion is in Section 2.3 and will be found in that section in the digital copy of the The Gerould Statistics.

There are 992 rows and 12 columns. The variable names are those used in Gerould, Purdue, and the ARL data.:

Variable names used in the Princeton data
Variable name What it means Notes
YEAR Academic year Academic years normally span two calendar years. This number is the second of the two years. That is, if it says 20, those data are for the 1919/20 academic year.
INSTNO Institution Number This is the key variable used in all three of these publications and the ARL data at the time. I will have to get that list
INAM Institution Name
TYPE Private/State
REGION ARL region
MEMBYR Year the library joined ARL Some Princeton libraries were never ARL members. ARL was founded in 1932.
VOLS Volumes Held
VOLSADG Volumes Added, gross Later ARL would add VOLSADN or volumes added, net
TOTSTF Total staff
EXPLMB Expenditures for materials and binding
FTESAL full-time salaries
APPROP Appropriations. That is, budget

The data.

The work was done in SAS but I no longer have access to SAS. I include two files in SAS formats but can no longer read them.

The Princeton Data
Dataset name Notes
Princeton.sas7bdat A SAS format
prisas.sd2 Another SAS format
priascii.txt ASCII text file. It is in order by the variables listed here. There is no space between YEAR and INAM, nor between TYPE and REGION. The CSV file is likely easier to use.
Princeton.csv CSV file

March 8, 2025
Back to the Main page