About T.W. Freeman and the Library
The library is named after T.W. Freeman, who assembled its first collections after he arrived in Trinity College Dublin in 1936. The passages below are taken from a history of the Department of Geography.
Within only eleven days of his arrival in Dublin Mr Freeman had begun to revitalise a young but ailing Geographical Society of Ireland. That story has been told elsewhere. Here it has to be recorded that the same ebullient enthusiasm which was so important to the Geographical Society was soon radiating from Mr Freeman's tiny ground-floor office in the southeastern corner of the Museum Building as with vigour he set about the achievement of his objectives - the creation within Trinity of a Department of Geography comparable with those already existing within the British universities
. . .
Slowly what was known as 'the Geography Diploma Library' grew in size, Mr Freeman himself issuing the books to students and keeping a careful note of the borrowing figures, those figures rising from 163 in 1936-37 to 234 in 1939-40, falling to only 162 at the height of the wartime Emergency in 1941-1942 and then rising to 320 in 1943-44.
. . .
The slow growth of the departmental library was paralleled by the slow growth of the departmental map collection and Mr Freeman spent much of his first Easter vacation sorting the collection and cataloguing its contents. Soon he was at work upon three other collections designed to further the work of his Department. Firstly, he assembled a large collection of 3 ¼ x 3 ¼ inch glass slides illustrative of all manner of geographical phenomena from the drainage pattern of the Appalachians to the paddy-fields of Kiangsi. Secondly, he built up a collection of geographical photographs culled from sources such as the National Geographic Magazine, each photograph being carefully mounted upon card. (Much later I found those photographs to be invaluable when conducting B.A. viva voce examinations and I will never forget the young lady who, when asked to comment upon a photograph taken on the Sogne Fiord with the 16,000 ton cruise liner Arandora Star lying at anchor, thought for a moment and then announced that it was a photograph of a cirque containing a tarn!). Finally, Mr Freeman began to gather a special collection of pamphlets, newscuttings, timetables, reports, and offprints, the collection being designed to assist students conducting research in virtually any field of Irish geography.