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1905–1918
Course: The library's work specialized early. The Indiana Collection — the seed of the library's later local-history and genealogy strength — was collecting from 1905, and survived until the early 1980s, when its materials were absorbed into other collections. A Children's Room opened in 1907. The first deposit collection — a small book stock placed where people already gathered — went out in 1909, to the Wayne Knitting Mills (the deposit idea is the root of the branch system, in the branches entry below). A Business and Municipal Department opened in 1912, an Order Department in 1915 and an Extension Department in 1916. In the First World War the library shipped 11,000 books to military camps; the influenza epidemic and the war then slowed the growth of circulation in 1918.
Sources:
- Slater-Putt, Beyond Books (1995), ch. 2 and 3 — the department dates, the wartime book shipments and the Indiana Collection's end.