The Valley Library

The Valley Library

North side of the library with the rotunda on the eastern end
Country United States
Type Academic
Established 1887
Location Corvallis, Oregon
Coordinates 44°33′54″N 123°16′34″W / 44.56511°N 123.2760°W / 44.56511; -123.2760Coordinates: 44°33′54″N 123°16′34″W / 44.56511°N 123.2760°W / 44.56511; -123.2760
Branch of OSU Libraries
Collection
Size 1.4 million volumes
14,000 serials
500,000 maps and government documents
Legal deposit Federal Depository Library
Access and use
Circulation 347,000
Other information
Budget $15.4 million
Director Faye Chadwell
Staff 84 (FTE)
Website osulibrary.oregonstate.edu

The Valley Library is the primary library of Oregon State University and is located at the school's main campus in Corvallis in the U.S. state of Oregon. Established in 1887, the school built its first library building in 1918, what is now Kidder Hall. The current building opened in 1963 as the William Jasper Kerr Library and was expanded and renamed in 1999 as The Valley Library. The library is named for philanthropist F. Wayne Valley, who played football for Oregon State.

One of three libraries for Oregon State, The Valley Library stores more than 1.4 million volumes, 14,000 serials, and more than 500,000 maps and government documents. It is designated as a Federal Depository Library and is also a repository for state documents. The six-story library building is of a contemporary, neoclassical style with a red-brick exterior highlighted by white sections along the top and on part of the eastern side. The eastern side includes a white-faced rotunda that features a two-story atrium on the main floor.

History

Oregon State University was established in 1868.[1] The Oregon Legislative Assembly appropriated $1,000 to the school to buy books for a library in 1876, marking the first instance of the legislature giving funds to the school for a library.[2] In 1887, the library was established at the school,[3] and in 1890, May Warren was hired as the first full-time librarian.[4] By 1893 the library's collection had grown to 1,950 volumes.[4] After adding 2,600 volumes from 1899 to 1900, the collection stood at 5,000 volumes.[3] At that time the library was a free, general library with both circulating and reference collections with A. J. Stimpson serving as the librarian.[3] The library also had 6,000 pamphlets at that time and the annual circulation was 8,000.[3]

By 1909, the collection had grown to 10,000 volumes and 10,000 pamphlets, with R. J. Nichols as the librarian.[5] The library collection continued to grow and totaled 36,478 volumes in 1918.[6] In February 1917, the state legislature gave the school $65,000 towards construction of a building to house the library.[7]

Oregon Agricultural College opened a new library in 1918,[8] marking the first time that the library had its own building.[9] Prior to 1918 the library had been housed on the second floor of the college's administration building, Benton Hall.[10] When the new building was completed, the school built a temporary trellis from neighboring Benton Hall's second floor to the second floor of the new building in order to more easily transfer the books to their new location.[9] Initially, the new building also housed offices and classrooms, but within a decade the library expanded to occupy all of the structure.[9] John V. Bennes designed the new building, as well as many of the campus buildings constructed during that period.[11] By 1922 the collection had grown to 73,000 volumes, and Lucy M. Lewis served as the school's librarian.[12]

Kidder Hall, the former home of the library

The new library was remodeled on several occasions, with a new wing added in 1941.[10] The 1918 building was located on the southeast corner of Campus Way and Waldo Place and after the 1941 addition, had about 76,000 square feet (7,100 m2) of space spread over three floors and a full basement.[9] Designed in the neoclassical style, the exterior was made of bricks and contained decorative plaques constructed of concrete, with the gabled roof covered with tile.[9] The original design had two-story reading rooms, which were converted to single-story rooms in the 1950s.[9] A mural painted by J. Leo Fairbanks was added to the main reading room in 1929 as a gift from the school's class of 1925.[13] The mural was titled Recorded Information and was the second mural in that room by Fairbanks, who was the longtime head of the school's art department.[13]

Beginning in 1932, Mary J. L. McDonald made the then-largest donation of books to the library when she donated volumes worth just over $10,000.[14] She donated a total of over 1,000 items that included a complete works of Abraham Lincoln valued at $4,800.[14] In 1936, the Works Progress Administration gave a decorative archway to the library to be installed over the south entrance to the building.[15] The library was among several buildings vandalized by University of Oregon students in October 1945 during the run-up to the Civil War football game between the two schools.[16] The library received a bequest of about 5,500 volumes valued at about $15,000 in December 1947 from William H. Galvani's estate.[17] This donation overtook that of McDonald to become the largest received by the library up to that time.[17]

By 1940, the collections at the library had increased to total of about 130,000 and 1,400 serials.[18] Included in the collections were a variety of rare items, such as a page from the 1642 printing of the Polychronicon, a 1628 book of poems written in Latin, and a 1769 bible printed by John Baskerville, among others.[18] At that time the building was open from 7:50 am until 10 pm on weekdays, and 2 pm to 5 pm on Sundays.[18] Construction on the new wing of the library started in 1940 and was designed by John V. Bennes,[19] the same architect who designed the original structure.[11] He also designed a matching wing for the other side as well, but that wing was never added.[9]

Kerr Library

The school's library collection grew to 193,479 volumes in 1943.[20] Previously known simply as The Library, the building and library were renamed in 1954 as the William Jasper Kerr Library.[9] Kerr was Oregon State's longest serving president, holding the office from 1907 until 1932 when he became the first chancellor of what is now the Oregon University System.[21]

In May 1960, the then Oregon State College was advanced $19,000 by the federal government to plan for a new $2,170,000 building.[8] The new building was designed by architects Hamlin & Martin, and the cost rose to $2.4 million by the time the school accepted bids on the project in April 1962.[22] Ground was broken on the project on May 1, 1962, with Shields Construction Company as the general contractor for the project.[23] The new building would double the size of Oregon State's library.[23]

Completed in 1963, the new library was built on Jefferson Street,[24] its present location, and the name was transferred from the old building.[25] At that time the building was four stories tall, but the school planned for a future expansion. During the original construction, slabs for two additional floors were placed on the roof.[26] Oregon State began construction in the Fall of 1970 to add these new floors, with completion coming in the Fall of 1971.[26] The old library building was remodeled and became Kidder Hall in 1964, named in honor of former librarian Ida Mae Kidder.[27] Previously, Fairbanks Hall had carried the moniker of Kidder Hall, starting in 1927.[9] By 1968 the collection had increased to 538,000 volumes.[28]

Rodney K. Waldron served as the head of the library from 1954 until 1984.[29] In the same year as Waldron's departure, Melvin R. George took over as director of the library, which at that time had a $4.5 million annual budget and 72 employees.[29] In 1986, a room was added to the library to accommodate a donation from alumnus Linus Pauling, which consisted of his papers and two Nobel Prizes.[30]

The Valley Library

Northern and western sides of the library after expansion completed in 1999

The collections of the library continued to grow, reaching 1,275,473 volumes in 1993.[31] In 1999, the building was renamed as The Valley Library after an extensive expansion and renovation.[32] Renovations took three years and cost $47 million to complete.[32] That year the library was selected by The Library Journal as the Library of the Year,[32] the first time an academic library had won the distinction.[33]

Librarians at Valley Library began using text messaging in March 2010 to communicate with some library patrons, and earlier started to loan out Amazon's Kindle reader.[34] In April, the school started allowing students to use the library 24-hours-a-day from Sunday through Thursday to test whether there was enough demand to allow 24-hour access on a permanent basis.[35] The program was sponsored by the Associated Students of Oregon State University and paid for by university technology funds, and was due in part to the closure of some computer labs that had been 24-hour study areas.[35]

Facilities

Campanile overlooking the Library Quad

The Valley Library is a six-story, rectangular building with a rotunda on the east side.[36] Designed in a contemporary, neoclassical style, the structure has a veneer of red brick, with white-colored aluminum solar screening on the rotunda and the fifth floor of the north side added for decoration.[36] The internal support structure consists of steel beams and concrete slabs.[26]

Below ground-level on the north side, the first floor includes a cafe and study rooms.[37] The main floor, which is the second floor, includes a two-story atrium as well as the circulation desk and main entrance.[38] The third floor contains the OSU Archives, and along with the fourth floor, houses the library's offices.[39][40] A children's library and the special collections are located on the fifth floor, while the sixth floor only covers the southern two-thirds of the structure.[41][42]

Directly north of the building is the Library Quad, originally known as the East Quadrangle.[18] The approximately 2.6-acre (1.1 ha) area was laid out about 1910 and is part of the Oregon State University Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places in June 2008.[43] A bell tower, or campanile, was added on the eastern edge of the quad in 2001.[44] Dedicated to alumnus H. Dean Papé, the 68-foot (21 m) tall tower has five bells and a clock.[44]

Operations

One of three libraries for Oregon State University, The Valley Library serves as the main library, and is located on the main campus in Corvallis.[45] The other two libraries are the Marilyn Potts Guin Library at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport[46] and the library at the Cascades Campus in Bend.[47] Faye Chadwell is the University Librarian as well as the OSU Press Director.[48][49]

Linus Pauling at graduation in 1922

As of 2008, the libraries, combined, employed about 120 people (FTE), of which 23 were librarians.[50] The three had a total of almost 1.6 million volumes in the collections, 16,992 serials, 2.1 million microform documents, and 3,849 e-books.[50] The Valley Library alone contained 1.4 million volumes and 14,000 serials out of those totals.[45] Valley also has over 500,000 government documents and maps, as it has served as a Federal Depository Library since 1907 and is a deposit library for the state government as well.[45][51] The three libraries combined had a budget of $10.8 million and a circulation of 347,000 while servicing 24,000 inter-library loans and averaging about 34,000 people per week at the libraries.[50]

Collections

The Valley Library includes a variety of special collections in addition to its main collection. Most notably are the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers that contain 4,111 books and 2,230 boxes of material from the two alums of Oregon State.[52] Separate from the library, the school is also home to the Linus Pauling Institute.[53]

Other collections in the Special Collections and Archives Research Center include the Atomic Energy and Nuclear History Collections that contains 294 feet (90 m) of items,[54] the McDonald Collection with 2,680 items that date back as far as 2000 BC,[55] two collections concerning the history of science, and 30 linear feet in the Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogues, among others.[56] Also contained in the Special Collections and Archives are around 200,000 photographs, memorabilia, campus publications, and a variety of other specimens related to the history of Oregon State University and its faculty's work.[57]

The Special Collections and Archives Research Center also include the papers of Bernard Malamud, William Appleman Williams, Milton Harris, Paul Emmett, David P. Shoemaker, Ewan Cameron, Fritz Marti, Eugene Starr, and Roger Hayward.[56] The library is decorated throughout with 120 pieces of the Northwest Art Collection, and serves as an art gallery.[58] Oregon's Percent for Art law set aside one percent of construction costs for artwork, which was then selected by the library along with the Oregon Arts Commission.[59]

References

  1. ↑ Horner, John B. (1919). Oregon: Her History, Her Great Men, Her Literature. The J.K. Gill Co.: Portland. p. 164-5
  2. ↑ "1870–1879". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Public, Society, and School Libraries. United States Bureau of Education / Government Printing Office. 1901. pp. 1116–1117.
  4. 1 2 "1890–1899". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  5. ↑ Hadley, Arthur Twining (1909). Faculties for Study and Research. United States Bureau of Education / Government Printing Office. pp. 116–117.
  6. ↑ "1910–1919". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  7. ↑ "Senate Passes Many Bills". The Oregonian. February 20, 1917. p. 5.
  8. 1 2 "OSC Library Gains Funds". The Oregonian. Associated Press. May 11, 1960. p. 7.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Site Information: Kidder Hall". Oregon Historic Sites Database. Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  10. 1 2 "Librarian Ends Long Service". The Oregonian. January 14, 1945. p. 11.
  11. 1 2 "State Work Awarded". The Oregonian. March 11, 1917. p. 23.
  12. ↑ Patterson, Homer L. (1922). Patterson's American Education. 19. Mount Prospect, Ill.: Educational Directories. p. 793.
  13. 1 2 "Mural Work Dedicated". The Oregonian. June 2, 1929. p. 18.
  14. 1 2 "Oregon State Gets Rare Lincoln Set". The Oregonian. February 11, 1934. p. 38.
  15. ↑ "Art Work Given College by WPA". The Oregonian. October 11, 1936. p. 8.
  16. ↑ "Schools to Curb 'Civil War' Pranks". The Oregonian. Associated Press. October 13, 1945. p. 16.
  17. 1 2 "$15,000 Value Set on Gift". The Oregonian. December 14, 1947. p. 20.
  18. 1 2 3 4 Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Oregon (1940). Oregon: End of the Trail. American Guide Series. Portland, Oregon: Binfords & Mort. pp. 164–165. OCLC 4874569.
  19. ↑ "Bidding Called On O.S.C. Job". The Oregonian. July 3, 1940. p. 11.
  20. ↑ "1940–1949". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  21. ↑ Bennett, Tom; George Edmonston, Jr. "William Jasper Kerr (1907–1932): "OSU's Great Builder" (Part one of a three-part series)". Oregon State University Alumni Association. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  22. ↑ "Adequate Married Students' Housing Urged By Education Board". The Oregonian. March 14, 1962. p. 9.
  23. 1 2 "OSU Library Ground Broken". The Oregonian. Associated Press. May 4, 1962. p. 20.
  24. ↑ "OSU Library Bids Entered". The Oregonian. April 16, 1962. p. 16.
  25. ↑ Edmonston, Jr., George P. “A Steady Hand” Back in the Day. Oregon Stater, Spring 2008. Vol. 93, No. 2. p. 40.
  26. 1 2 3 "Building Construction". OSU Archives. Retrieved 2009-07-02.
  27. ↑ "OSU Project Bids Listed". The Oregonian. September 17, 1964. p. 26.
  28. ↑ "1960–1969". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  29. 1 2 "Library head named". The Oregonian. November 22, 1983. p. 32.
  30. ↑ "Pauling: Nation's 'fiddling' with nukes imperils peace". Spokane Chronicle. Associated Press. April 18, 1986. p. 6.
  31. ↑ "1990–1999". Chronological History of Oregon State University. OSU Libraries-University Archives. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  32. 1 2 3 Khanna, Roma. “OSU’s new library lets students kick back, plug in”, The Oregonian, May 28, 1999.
  33. ↑ Cassell, Faris (July 25, 1999). "Lit City". Register-Guard. Eugene, Oregon. p. H1.
  34. ↑ "OSU librarian: ?4U". OregonLive. The Associated Press. March 25, 2010. Retrieved 25 March 2010.
  35. 1 2 Hatch, Cheryl (April 19, 2010). "Valley Library pulls an all-nighter". Gazette-Times. Corvallis, OR. Retrieved 21 April 2010.
  36. 1 2 "Site Information: Valley Library, The". Oregon Historic Sites Database. Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  37. ↑ "First Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  38. ↑ "Second Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  39. ↑ "Third Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  40. ↑ "Fourth Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  41. ↑ "Fifth Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  42. ↑ "Sixth Floor". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  43. ↑ "Site Information: Library Quad". Oregon Historic Sites Database. Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  44. 1 2 Hood, Robert (October 2, 2001). "OSU dedicates new bell tower". The Daily Barometer. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  45. 1 2 3 "The Valley Library". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  46. ↑ "Guin Home". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  47. ↑ "Cascades". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  48. ↑ "Library Administration". Oregon State University Libraries. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 24 September 2011.
  49. ↑ "Library Organizational Chart" (PDF). Oregon State University Libraries. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 24 September 2011.
  50. 1 2 3 "Compare Academic Libraries: Oregon State University". National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. 2009. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  51. ↑ "Government Information". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 24 April 2010.
  52. ↑ "Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers". Special Collections. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  53. ↑ Earnshaw, Aliza (October 26, 2007). "OSU raises $350 million in first capital campaign". Portland Business Journal. Retrieved 2010-05-06.
  54. ↑ "Atomic Energy and Nuclear History Collections". Special Collection. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  55. ↑ "McDonald Collection". Special Collections. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  56. 1 2 "Collections". Special Collections. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  57. ↑ "OSU Archives Frequently Asked Questions". University Archives. Oregon State University Libraries. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  58. ↑ Richard, Terry (October 27, 2012). "Valley Library at Oregon State University covers walls, nooks with art". The Oregonian. Retrieved 28 October 2012.
  59. ↑ "Northwest Art Collection". Libraries. Oregon State University. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
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