Richard Couper, who died Wednesday at 83, was the first full-time president of the New York Public Library.

Couper led the library during the financial crises of the 1970s. During his tenure, there were cutbacks in library hours, staff reductions, and the library was forced to dip into its small endowment just to keep branches open.

Nevertheless, Couper managed to raise $50 million and balance the library’s budget for the first time since 1924. He also opened the Schomberg Center, the library’s Harlem annex, and undertook the massive project of closing the card catalog and making it electronic. The card catalog was preserved, however, reproduced card for card in a bound set of 800 folio-sized volumes that can be consulted in the public catalog room, a monument to a vanished age. New York was the first major library system to embrace electronic record keeping.

“He deserves massive credit for embracing the power of technology,” the library’s current president, Paul LeClerc, said.

When Couper was appointed, in 1971, he was greeted with an immediate $1 million deficit, thanks to a reduction in state funds. He responded by cutting the main reading room’s hours to 40 from 78 a week, a move that caused howls of protest from the public. Couper explained that his other option, cutting acquisitions, “would be like cutting the library’s arteries.” Branch libraries took an even bigger hit.

“Dick brought us through that time with an enormous amount of dignity,” Mr. LeClerc said.

Couper soon attracted federal support and private grants and launched a campaign that eventually increased the number of private donors to the library to 40,000 from 3,000. In 1975, when city finances approached their lowest ebb, Couper had the library’s iconic lions, Patience and Fortitude, restored.

Couper was raised in Binghamton, Mass., and was the sixth generation of Coupers to attend Hamilton College. His father, Edgar Couper, was an insurance executive and prominent advocate in the establishment of Binghamton University, and also served as chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.

After interrupting his education to enlist in the Army in 1942, Couper rose to the rank of captain while serving in the ordnance department. He was stationed in remote Attu, Alaska.

Couper earned a master’s degree in American history from Harvard, then joined his father’s insurance firm, Couper Ackerman Sampson, Incorporated. In 1962, he returned to Hamilton as an administrative vice president and subsequently served as acting president and provost of the college. He eventually became a life trustee of the college, and remained active in alumni affairs until the end of his life.

In 1969, Couper was named the first deputy commissioner of the New York education department, and resigned in 1971 to become president of the library.

Couper cut a dynamic figure, with a gray-blond crewcut, and liked to slam his hand on the table for emphasis, at least when reporters were present. He seemed to mean it when he talked about the “absolute pain” of terminating 20% of the library’s 1,309 workers in 1975.

Couper, who said when he took the job that he would stay for a decade, left the library in 1981 to become president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in Princeton. He retired in 1990 and moved back to Clinton, N.Y., where he built a new home not far from Hamilton College. In 2001, he constructed a library as an addition, where he kept a full-size copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and his beloved Francis Parkman histories, among 5,000 other volumes.

Semiannually, until he fell ill last year, he convened a party with toasts, at which he and his friends paid lavish tribute to the concept of civility, which he feared was endangered.

Richard Watrous Couper
Born December 16, 1922, in Binghamton; died January 25 at his home in Clinton, N.Y.of severe anemia; survived by his wife, Patsy, his children, Frederick Couper, Thomas Couper, and Margaret Haskins, four grandchildren, and a sister, Katharine Couper Watrous.