In 2004, after 90 years, the City of Cincinnati’s Municipal Reference Library was about to come to an ignominious end, consigned to the dumpster. With the active involvement of city planner Skip Forwood and UC history professor Judith Spraul-Schmidt, the bulk of this valuable collection of urban resource materials was rescued and given a home in the Archives & Rare Books Library’s Urban Studies Collection. Now, it is catalogued and available once more for research.

Photo: “The Flying Squad, Co. No. 4” from the 1913 Annual Report of the Cincinnati Fire Department, one of the many resources of the Muncipal Reference Library

The Municipal Reference Library was created in 1913 under the Municipal Code of Cincinnati, which detailed the purpose of the library, and the Administrative Code, which stated that it would be maintained by the city’s planning department. Consisting primarily of city records, periodicals, reports, ordinances, news clippings, and studies, the MRL historically had been open to the public, but primarily used by city employees. From 1913 to 1983, the library was maintained and administered by the City of Cincinnati, but budget cuts led to a short-term agreement with the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County to administer it. In 1998 the public library withdrew its support, and the library became dormant. When it was decided by the City of Cincinnati to re-fit the MRL’s space for offices, it seemed the collection was doomed. Plans were made to discard all of it.

That is when Mr. Forwood and Professor Spraul-Schmidt stepped up. Spraul-Schmidt, in teaching history classes at UC’s Raymond Walters College, realized the tremendous research value of the MRL. Working with Forwood, she contacted the University of Cincinnati Libraries and the Archives & Rare Books Library in the summer of 2004. Because of its strength in holding important research materials in its Urban Studies Collection, the Archives & Rare Books Library was a natural home for the considerable historical and contemporary value of the MRL’s documentation of the city’s heritage and development, particularly for reports from the mid-19^th century to the late 20^th century that are not available elsewhere.

The first stage in making the MRL’s holdings available was to accession the vertical files of clippings, ordinances, and photographs. This was done in 2004, while the remainder of the collection – reports, monographs, and studies – was housed on campus pending cataloguing. The Catalog Department recently completed its work on the hundreds of volumes, which have now been sent to the Archives & Rare Books Library. For instance, researchers can study the bound annual reports of the Cincinnati Fire Department from 1854 to 1916. There are materials on neighborhoods, flood control, the police department, planning efforts, parks & recreation; in short, anything connected with Cincinnati over the past century and a half. All the catalogued materials are listed on UCLID, and the vertical files are inventoried and available on ARB’s website under its Urban Studies Collection Records.

Text by Kevin Grace