On 24 January 1914, the Board elected Josiah Gilbart Smyly as the next Librarian. (See Figure 21.) He was the Professor of Latin and one of the few Fellows at the time to have published anything of significance. Within months, Europe had descended into war. The College and its Library could not fail to be affected by this and by the rising of 1916, but the long-term impact of those events paled in comparison to the political and financial implications of Irish independence in 1922. Throughout that turbulent period Smyly, who relinquished the Chair of Latin in 1915 for the Regius Chair of Greek, which he held alongside the Librarianship until 1927, spent most of his time deciphering papyri and left the Library in the care of the senior Assistant Librarian.

The post of senior Assistant Librarian was held by Alfred de Burgh from 1896 until his death in 1929. Readers were largely unaware of his presence behind the scenes, attempting to impose some order on the flood of material arriving from the Copyright Agency, handling staff matters and dealing on an almost daily basis with Sir Thomas Manly Deane during the planning of the 1937 Reading Room. A contemporary College newspaper described his daily routine: ‘every morning at ten o'clock he appeared, a thin, black-clad figure, rapidly crossing the Fellows’ Garden, vanished into the upper regions of the Library, and was seen no more, until, on the stroke of four, he recrossed the Garden, always with the same intent and preoccupied air, and disappeared through the Nassau Street gate’. (See Figure 17.)