This is a transcription of Chancellor Samuel P. Capen's speech at the dedication of Lockwood Memorial Library on May 15, 1935. To view a facsimile of the speech, click on the picture to the right:

I accept these keys as "symbols of the formal assignment of this building and its contents to the educational uses of the University of Buffalo. By this act I dedicate the Lockwood Memorial Library to the advancement of learning.

The University of Buffalo has been created through gifts large and small from those who have believed in it and in the purposes for which it stands. No other institution of equal age has received gifts from so many persons. Their numbers run into tens of thousands. The gift which we are met today to acknowledge is the greatest single donation ever made to the University. Through this gift Thomas Bell and Marion Birge Lockwood take their places among the principal founders of the University of Buffalo.

I use the word "founders" vith deliberate intent. The foundation of a university is not accomplished once for all in one moment of time. It is a perpetual process, never completed. And often the most important parts of university foundations are not laid until the instititutions are already venerable. Such has been in some degree the case with the University of Buffalo. In a double sense Mr. and Mrs. Lockwood's great benefaction represents a foundation that is essential to any university which aspires to a commanding position in the domain of scholarship.

For every institution of higher learning the one perennially indispensable possession is a library. It has been so from the early beginnings of universities. Subjects of study and methods of instruction may change. New disciplines may arise, old disciplines totally disappear. The social purposes of universities may be completely altered, as they have been over and over again since universities were first established. But the dependence of a university upon its library does not abate. The reason is plain. The record of what men have accomplished and thought and imagined and wondered about is stored in books. The specifications of civilization are in books. The past is in books, and also to some extent the future; for out of books, the deposit of the thought of dead and living thinkers, comes often the seed of a new idea which germinating in another mind may remake a corner of the world. Books do not become less important as universities open up new intellectual territory and devise new ways of probing the mysteries of nature and of human life. They become ever more important. The library is second only to the teacher as an instrument of university education. But individual teachers pass and in the course of time, unless they are very great, they are no longer remembered. Each student's need for teachers passes as he ripens in years and in experience. But his need for the library does not pass. And the library itself remains, the repository of learning, the tool without which every student young or old is impotent, the veritable corner-stone upon which the whole intellectual structure of the university rests.

A collection of useful books, of standard books, of books easily obtained -- however extensive and accessible it may be and however sumptuously housed -- does not make a university library of the first order. To merit this distinction a university library must preserve in the form in which they came from the hands of their makers the recorded writings of the centuries. It must offer the scholar the inspiration and the surety of the original source. It must be able to fire the imagination of the neophyte by bringing him into the physical presence of the great monuments of letters. It must reveal to those who have eyes to see the elaborate and manifold arts of printing and binding.

The University of Buffalo today becomes the possessor of a university library in both the connotations of the word. It becomes the possessor of a building, beautiful, imposing, commodious and destined to endure for generations. It becomes the possessor of an extraordinary collection of literary treasures assembled with insight and purpose and rare discrimination, representing an unbroken chain of the masterpieces of five centuries. The Library of the University of Buffalo today takes rank among the leading university libraries of the United States.

It would be impossible to make proper acknowledgment of such a gift. I can not even attempt it. But in the present ease the attempt is unnecessary; perhaps it would even be unwelcome. For today's formal act represents the realization of the generous ambition of many years. The gift to the University of Buffalo of this library with its great collection was long ago a dream of Mr. Lockwood's; and then it became a promise, and then a plan. As the plan bas taken visible form he has collaborated in every detail. And it has been a labor of love. No words of mine could possibly enhance the satisfaction he must feel at this culmination of a project so long the central interest of his life. I dare believe he is a the happiest man here.

And I hope his imagination ranges through the decades that lie ahead and and catches a clear vision of those generations of students and teachers yet unborn to whom this great benefaction will bring profit and delight. Whoever serves a university thus magnificently has achieved something akin to immortality.