Vol. 1, No. 1 Fall 2003

Thirty Years Ago: The New Library is Launched

By Jack Ray

On March 15, 1973, the Vietnam War was winding down following a cease-fire agreement; Richard Nixon was in the White House, but the storm clouds of the Watergate scandal that would drive him from office were gathering. The only Hussein in the news was the king of Jordan. The Orioles of Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, and Jim Palmer were in spring training. And in Baltimore the Loyola/Notre Dame Library opened its doors for the first time.

A great deal of planning and hard work had led up to this momentous day. In 1968 Loyola College and the College of Notre Dame had established the library corporation as a nonprofit organization that would be jointly funded by the two colleges and administered through a separate board of trustees. Ground was broken on May 5, 1971, and the finishing touches of construction were still under way as the two separate libraries began the difficult process of merging their collections to become one joint library.

In the fall of 1972 I was in my second year as Acquisitions Librarian at Loyola College. Youthful bravado and ignorance had led me to volunteer to organize and manage the move into the new library. Bill Kirwan, Loyola's library director, and the soon-to-be director of the joint library, accepted my offer.

From the start we decided to do the moving job ourselves with rented U-Haul trucks and student labor. To pack the collections we acquired scores of National Bohemian beer cartons from their brewery in Canton (one of our first tasks was to remove the shards of broken beer bottles that remained in the boxes). We also hired a number of students from both colleges to work on the move; we knew this would not be one of those one-day book walks done with volunteers.

A student assistant and I had spent a lot of time measuring the collections of both colleges, as well as the shelves in the new library. The problem was to allocate the right amount of space for each part of the collection and to devise a means for merging the two collections. We decided to initally place the books from the two colleges on alternating shelves and interfile them later.

We began the move after the Christmas holidays. Notre Dame's collection was almost all on the main floor of Fourier, but Loyola's was on the third and second floors of Jenkins - and there were no elevators. We built ramps down one of the stairwells, and after the boxes were packed and labeled the students slid them down the ramps to the ground floor and carried them out to the truck. The students then piled into the back of the truck and rode over to the new library, where the boxes were carried in through the loading dock in back.

It all took much longer than we had expected. We were lucky with the weather - there was virtually no snow that winter - but as time went on students began to lose interest and often we were operating with a lot fewer people than we had counted on. While we thought we had identified everything that would have to be moved, it seemed that nearly every day we would get a call from some campus office about a little collection that was supposed to be moved to the new library. And occasionally there were some mysterious miscalculations that necessitated reallocating shelf space. It was a great relief when everything was finally in the new library. And after working seven days a week for about two months, I vowed that if I was ever again employed by a library that was planning a move, I would strongly urge them to hire professional movers!

On Saturday, May 12, the new library held its dedication ceremony. Famed novelist Paul Horgan delivered an address entitled "Escape from the Present Tense" in which he celebrated libraries as repositories of the "collective memory of mankind"; one wonders if Mr. Horgan, who died at age 91 in 1995, would have looked askance at the proliferation of electronic databases and archives, given his comment that he "remain[ed] certain that nothing will ever take the place of that equation which is created when an individual takes up a book, holds it in his hands, enters it with his eyes, and establishes a current which runs both ways in a privacy as satisfying as it is illimitable, as personal as it is inviolable, and as rewarding as it is without mechanical obstacle." Honorary doctorates were awarded to Henry A. Knott (noted benefactor to Catholic educational institutions and general contractor of the new library building); his wife Marion Burk Knott; Loyola past president Vincent F. Beatty, S.J.; and Notre Dame past president Sister Margaret Mary O'Connell, S.S.N.D. His Eminence Lawrence Cardinal Shehan gave the benediction, and the gathering then adjourned to the outdoor reading deck for a reception.

Thirty years later, as the Loyola/Notre Dame Library looks forward to a much-needed renovation and addition that will better enable it to provide 21st-century academic library services and facilities, it is well to note that at its inception this was a state-of-the-art library that won an architectural prize jointly awarded by the American Library Association and the American Institute of Architects, and was featured on the cover of the December 1, 1973, "Architectural Issue" of Library Journal. Then as now the library's underlying mission has remained constant: the provision of top-quality library services and resources to the communities of Loyola College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

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