D. H. Hill Jr. Library
The current building, situated on the Hillsborough Street edge of North Campus,[1] is the result of four stages of construction, and houses the majority of the volumes in NC State's collection.
In December 1889, the University Board of Trustees authorized $650 for periodicals and books, which were placed in a single room in Holladay Hall.
Comprising 1,500 volumes by 1890, it reflected Hill's scholarly and literary interests instead of a purely scientific and engineering focus; indeed, the library was considered to be part of the Department of English.
[12] In the fall of 1903, the library relocated to the ground floor of the old Pullen Hall (built 1902, destroyed by arson February 1965), where it would remain for the next 22 years.
[15] In October 1922, with the situation in a dismal state, a resolution was adopted by university alumni resolving that, "the Board of Trustees be asked to include in their recommendations to the Legislature of 1923 a request for an appropriation of $250,000 to build and equip a library capable of serving the needs of a greater and better North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering.
"[17] Following a report produced by a federal expert, the new college president, Eugene Brooks, hired James R. Gulledge (1891–1941)[18] as the first professionally trained head librarian.
Built at a final cost of $266,500, including $25,000 for equipment, it was designed by New York architect Hobart Upjohn in a post-colonial style reminiscent of Monticello.
The second floor was occupied by graduate student and faculty seminar and research rooms, while bookstacks with a maximum capacity for 150,000 volumes were housed in the basement.
[19] The first professional Director in several years, and the first modern one, Kellam found the library in a chaotic state upon taking up his appointment; government publications and periodicals lay uncatalogued in the basement, faculty members were allowed to keep books indefinitely and academic departments had continued to purchase books and periodicals, but had generally neither cataloged them properly nor made them available to others.
As a result, hours of service increased during evenings and weekends, faculty members were allowed to only keep borrowed materials for a year before having to renew them and a training program was instituted for student assistants.
As Kellam concluded, "...the present library building was planned from an artistic point of view and not for efficiency and without benefit of a librarian's advice.
"[30] On September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out, Circulation Librarian Harlan Craig Brown (1906 – 10 October 1982) was appointed as Kellam's successor.
During the Second World War, all male library staff members entered the services, including Brown, who left for the army in November 1942.
During the immediate postwar years, the library struggled; the now-obsolete building only provided seating for four percent of the total student and faculty population.
The new four-story brick and limestone library (today the "East Wing" of D. H. Hill) was completed in December 1953 and opened in the summer of 1954.
Bookstacks were closed to undergraduates, but were open to graduate students and faculty once they had been given a tour by the circulation librarian and received a stack permit.
In 1962, the first full-time African-American library staff member, Edward Walker, was hired as a mail clerk first class (he would retire in 1992 as the bookstack supervisor).
Odell Associates, Inc. was selected as the architectural firm, and $2.483 million was initially appropriated for construction by the 1967 General Assembly, with additional state funds being approved in April 1968.
As the foundations of the Erdahl-Cloyd Wing were insufficiently strong to support heavy bookstacks, the university decided to locate the Reserve Reading Room and an open-shelf browsing area on the first floor.
However, they abandoned the project due to financial troubles, necessitating the employment of new contractors, which delayed completion of the addition by two years.
In 2006, the Libraries introduced a revolutionary new online catalogue based on the Endeca platform, which provided users with advanced search and navigation capabilities.
[57] On April 20, 2009, University Dining, partnered with the department of food science and D. H. Hill Library, opened the Creamery ice cream shop in the West Wing.
[58] During the summer of 2011, further renovations to the West Wing transformed an area formerly housing print periodicals into over 13,600 feet of study space, also allowing trials with the new furnishings and technology to be installed in the Hunt Library.
A lounge area by the Creamery became the Technology Sandbox, with whiteboards, gaming stations, writable glass walls and interactive tables.
The first librarian, Rachel Penn Lane, organized the textiles collection of 1000 volumes and periodicals in preparation for the transfer to Nelson Hall, which was made on June 6, 1945.
[69] Librarians of the Textiles and the Burlington Textiles Library were: Rachel Penn Lane (1945–1946), Jane Byrd (1946–1947), Katherine McDiarmid (1947–1957), Martha Lynch (1957–1959; acting), Adrianna Orr (1959–1965), Geraldine Stallings (1965–1967), Davora Nielsen (1967–1969), James Baker (1969–1976), Georgia Rodeffer (1976–1984), Catherine Pollari (1985, acting), Barbara Best Nichols (1985–1990), Cynthia Ruffin (1990, interim), Paul Garwig (1990–1998), Suzanne Weiner (1998–2001) and Honora Eskridge (2001–2013).
[75] The Atrium is a group of quick-service restaurants, accepting on-campus meal plans, "dining dollars", Visa, MasterCard and cash.
D. H. Hill Jr. Library houses the majority of the volumes in NCSU's collection, and is a designated federal and state document repository.
Materials relating to education, mathematics and African studies are primarily held in three small departmental media centers, which are affiliated with the Libraries.
A Satellite Shelving Facility mostly houses older journals and periodical publications for the NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
