More Alden Library, through the years

This is the last post about Alden Library, I promise. I thought that this being a history blog and all, I should include some, well, history about libraries on campus. So here's what I've dug up:

• The first hundred years or so is a little hazy. Sometime in the 1830s, accounts by travelers describe a library with an estimated 2,000 volumes.
• In the late 1870s, several literary societies combined their separate libraries with the university’s. (Below are bookplates identifying volumes collected by two such literary societies.)

• The first official library building on campus was the Carnegie Library (1905-1931), which is now Scripps Hall. Andrew Carnegie, who donated $30,000 toward its construction, required that the library be open to “all Athens citizens, school teachers, and children.
  
• Once the university began to outgrow Carnegie Library, the Chubb Library was built (1931-1969). Now known as Chubb Hall, it houses administrative offices. (Students fill the main study room, below, sometime in the late 1940s.)

• When Ohio University’s fifteenth president, Vernon R. Alden, stated in his 1962 inaugural address that the university’s greatest need was for a new library, he wasn’t exaggerating. His administration saw a doubling of enrollment and faculty, and OU had literally outgrown Chubb Library. Says Dr. Alden, “We had Chubb Library, which was very nice, but even with 8,000 students in those days it wasn’t adequate. And it certainly wasn’t adequate for graduate programs and for the research activities of faculty members.”
  
• Construction on Alden Library began in 1966. (Below, a group of students talk to President Alden near the construction site.)

• Alden Library officially opens in 1969, but the east and west wings weren’t completed until 1972. (Below, students fill the current periodicals area in the early 1980s.)

• In 1979, the library acquires its one-millionth volume, a Bible that dates back to the 13^thcentury.
  
• Goodbye card catalogues. ALICE, the online catalogue, is adopted in 1983.
  
• Hwa-Wei Lee Library Annex on Columbus Road opens in 1998.
  
• Wireless Internet access is made available throughout Alden Library in 2003.
  
• In 2004, the 2^nd floor Learning Commons (pictured below) is created, which remains open to students 24 hours a day.

Photo credits - Bookplate images: Scanned from “Ohio University, 1804-2004: The Spirit of a Singular Place” by Betty Hollow. Images of Chubb Library, Alden Library under construction and Alden Library during the 1980s: Courtesy of Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, published by Ohio University Libraries, University Archives available at http://media.library.ohiou.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/archives.

Fast facts about Alden Library

Did you know?

• Alden Library averages nearly 6,400 entrances a day when a quarter is in session. That multiplies to 1,700,000 entrances just last year.
  
• In the past five years, entrances have gone up 73 percent.
  
• The 2^nd floor Learning Commons is open and staffed 24 hours a day.
  
• The library has a peak usage hour at 2 a.m.
• The Alden Library Web site has about 7.5 million global visitors annually and is recognized as one of the top research libraries in the country.
  
• The illustration on the ALICE online catalogue home page comes from the work of Sir John Tenniel who illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• It inaugurated the now well-known OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) system by becoming the first library in the world to perform online computerized cataloging in 1971.
• Now, with OhioLINK, students and faculty have access to more than 20 million volumes and thousands of electronic journals from more than seventy-five campus libraries across the state.

(Top: A librarian shelves books in "the stacks" of Alden Library during the seventies. Bottom: Senior marketing major Sara Heal sits among her own stack of books.)

Photo Credit - Top image: Courtesy of Robert E. & Jean R. Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections