National Library Week: A University Library in Oregon

It’s National Library Week in the United States, always a cause for celebration for this fan of libraries. This year, I’m featuring libraries I encountered during a recent trip to the American Pacific Northwest.

While most of us think first of our local public library, there are countless other types, as well. Governments, businesses and religious organizations maintain libraries to serve their particular requirements. Some of the largest and most significant libraries around the world are those at colleges and universities. A good library is an important part of any school’s assets, an excellent library may distinguish a university from others, and a world-class research library is a requirement for schools intent on attracting and retaining first-rate scholars and researchers.

Our base for the recent trip was Eugene, Oregon, home to the University of Oregon (UO).

While its enrollment of 22,000 doesn’t place it among the largest American universities, UO is highly regarded as a research institution, and has a number of specialized libraries for science, mathematics, law, marine biology and design. The school’s main library — the one most undergraduates, are familiar with — is the Knight Library.

Built in 1937, renovated and expanded in 1950, 1966 and 1994, the Knight Library holds more than three million items in a wide variety of media and disciplines.

It stretches across the southern side of grassy, tree-covered Memorial Quadrangle. On the east of the quad is the 1933 Jordan Schnitzler Museum of Art.

Walking into Oregon’s library, I was confronted by seemingly acres of carpeting with tables holding workstations.

Where are the books?

No, I’m not that clueless. A significant percentage of the information and resources any student or researcher needs today is available electronically — an absolute requirement for contemporary libraries. UO, in fact, is well forward in its fostering of electronic access linking its own group of libraries, as well as others in a variety of knowledge communities. No matter what their discipline or degree, today’s students are preparing to deal with a digital world, and libraries everywhere reflect the demand on access to digital information.

There are books — a couple million of ’em — farther into the library, on multiple floors. I didn’t have time to explore the place, but enjoyed my brief look at this extensive university library.

As you see, there are some stylish new portions behind that Romanesque/Art Deco facade of the original building.

If you wonder, “Where are the students?” I was there near closing hour on weekend day at the end of the school’s spring break.

As much as I enjoy visiting — and showing you — interesting library facilities, old and new, National Library Week is the time to observe that a library is more than a building, more than printed material, computers, maps, photographs and ancient manuscripts, audio and video recordings. It’s an intelligently designed nexus for retrieving information, and only functions effectively thanks to the work of often unseen numbers of professional librarians, researchers, conservators and archivists.

Although they hail from an ecclesiastical source — not a secular one — the words inscribed above the two entrances to the Knight Library are common in such a setting, and are often found on libraries or school buildings. They appeared on a stone tablet above the entrance to the building where I was an English major in undergraduate days.

Do you have a favorite college or university library? What’s special about it: the collection, the architecture or design, its history — or perhaps simply its association with your own college days? Leave a comment.

Happy Library Week. I’ll visit more Pacific Northwest libraries in the coming days.

© Brad Nixon 2019.