Cougar's Den: Birth of a Library

I thought I would start out with some images from the college's past. As you may know, our current college campus started out in 1992 with three major buildings, the Administration Building, the Student Center and the Learning Resource Center. You may be interested in learning a little about what it took to start a brand new library pretty much from scratch.

As the finishing touches were put on the building's exterior, attention began to shift to the interior.

Here construction materials and shelving await being put to use.

SCCs first ACE center, located in what is now the Information Commons, is still pretty much under construction in this 1991 photo.

The construction and opening of the new college library was due to the hard work of the first library director, Joan Clarke (in red blouse above). Here lRC staff inspect the new building.

The campus plaza was still on the drawing boards in this view from the library director's office.

Actually, we didn't exactly start the library from scratch. We purchased the entire library from St. Mary's college which then had to be packed in boxes and shipped to the new campus.

St. Mary's library was in an older building and most of the books were not exactly current but at least it was a start.

Books were not the only thing that had to be moved. Their entire card catalog had to be transferred, as well.

A moving company was hired for the heavy work of actually moving the books from one campus to another.

Here, books are being placed on the new LRC shelving.

Since St. Mary's still used the older Dewey Decimal System for organizing their books, all of the records had to be updated to the newer Library of Congress system. Here we see our first head reference librarian Dennis Krieb and Betty Warren hard at work on the change.

LRC staff spent many hours on the changeover and then spent many hours more ordering new books to supplement the existing collection. It actually took until 1998 to finish converting all of the old books.