The Records of the Library Auxiliary Groups began under the direction of Librarians A. W. Tyler (1877-1879) and William Hand Browne (1879-1891). Some of the activities recorded include the tenure of Nicholas Murray, the tradition of advanced study and research, a fire in McCoy Hall on September 17, 1908, re-cataloging and reclassification of the entire Library, and the move to the Homewood campus and Gilman Hall.

The Friends of the Johns Hopkins Library, founded in March 1931, helped to improve annual contributions to the Library, specifically for new acquisitions. The support of the Friends has continued to the present day. The late 1930s and early 1940s saw a return to a steadier rate of accessions and a marked increase in gifts and bequests. By 1941, in fact, when the Gilman facility was exactly twenty-five years old, Librarian John Calvin French (1927-1941) noted ominously in his Annual Report that "nearly every department is troubled by a lack of space." The Johns Hopkins Library then held a total of 535,308 volumes.

In 1958 Librarian John Berthel (1954-1973) reported that architects had been commissioned to study and compare two alternatives: (1) a full scale reconstruction of Gilman Hall, and (2) a new Library building, on a new site, which would incorporate and consolidate holdings that were then dispersed among eight different buildings. Although there was initially dissent from professors who preferred the self-contained arrangements of the library/laboratories in the sciences and the departmental libraries in Gilman, the Faculty Library Committee eventually approved the idea of a new building which would house the collections of the entire Homewood campus. Ground broke in 1962 and on November 15, 1964, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library was opened. On opening day it held 1,122,065 volumes, more than five times as many as Gilman on its opening day forty-eight years earlier.