The first professional Director in several years, and the first modern one, Kellam found the library in a chaotic state upon taking up his appointment; government publications and periodicals lay uncatalogued in the basement, faculty members were allowed to keep books indefinitely and academic departments had continued to purchase books and periodicals, but had generally neither cataloged them properly nor made them available to others. The student assistants who operated the library during nights and weekends were poorly trained, poorly supervised and often disorganized. To rectify the situation, Kellam centralized the acquisition of periodicals, increased the number of professional librarians on staff, nearly doubled the number of volumes in the collection and organized the library into five departments: circulation, reference (documents), order (books and periodicals), cataloging and periodicals (check-in, binding, exchanges). Each department was headed by a professional librarian. As a result, hours of service increased during evenings and weekends, faculty members were allowed to only keep borrowed materials for a year before having to renew them and a training program was instituted for student assistants. A browsing room opened in 1936 and the collection grew to 50,000 volumes in 1937. The University Archives were begun in the University's 50th anniversary year in 1939, and expenditures increased to $10,000 the same year; the number of current periodicals received by the library nearly doubled from 400 to 700. However, by the time Kellam left on August 31, 1939, the D. H. Hill Library building was found to be cramped and functionally obsolete. The library was no longer in the center of the campus, as the campus had expanded west over the previous decade. As Kellam concluded, "...the present library building was planned from an artistic point of view and not for efficiency and without benefit of a librarian's advice. The same mistake should not be repeated."