Morris Cohen Will Take Post At Law Library

Morris L. Cohen. law librarian at the University of Pennsylvania since 1963, will become the head librarian of the vast Harvard Law School Library on July 1.

Cchen-who deferred his appointment as librarian for ten months in order to assist Pennsylvania in the search for his successor-succeeds Earl Borgeson. Borgeson left for Stanford last summer after nearly two decades at the Law School.

During the interim period, George A. Straight, associate librarian of the Law School Library, has administered the Library's staff of 70 persons and has overseen the maintenance of its 1.2 million volumes.

Service Oriented

"Morris Cehen is a man very much concerned with providing services to the people who use the library," Albert M. Sacks, dean of the Law School said yesterday.

"One of the risks of having such a large library is that while you gain in total resources available, you stand to lose in accessibility and services. Cohen's great strength is that he is able to provide these latter qualities," he said.

Cohen-who has been serving as president of the American Association of Law Libraries for the past year and will preside over its annual conference beginning in Miami today-is unusual in that he is both a lawyer and a librarian.

The Law School Library Committee, in consultation with an advisory group of librarians from around the country which had coincidentally been formed to study library policy at the School in 1970, agreed to go after Cohen when Borgeson announced his departure to Stanford early in the year.

Delayed Appointment

"He was a very strong and clear candidate from a large group from around the country," Sacks recalled yesterday. Cohen's appointment originally was to have become effective last September 1.

Cohen turned down Columbia to go to Penn in 1963 and has written a book entitled "Legal Research in a Nutshell" which goes into its second printing this summer.

His time for writing may be some-what limited in the future, however, now that he has inherited the most complex nutshell among law libraries-one which caters to a relentlessly demanding clientele.