ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

University of Arizona Opens New $12 Million Library

The students, faculty, and other users of the University of Arizona Library waited a half- century between new main library buildings. Many of the current users, now totaling more than 30,000, think it may have been worth the wait. The new building opened its doors on January 13, the first day of classes for the spring 1977 semester, and the flood of users and visitors pouring into it has not abated. By the time of the formal dedication on April 13, the automatic exit counters had recorded 425,000 persons, more than the estimated annual total for the old building. Certainly some of those visitors were just sightseeing, but gawking does not account for increased circulation of books, which jumped (system-wide) more than 38 percent over the same period one year earlier despite a small decrease in the student body size. Reshelving of materials used in the building, but not checked out, rose by a similar amount, and an increase of more than 25 percent in reference questions was recorded.

These statistics will not surprise other academic librarians who have experienced the growth phenomenon associated with opening a new, attractive, comfortable, and easy-to-use facility. Librarians at the University of Arizona are delighted with the increased use, but an understandable sentiment of “thank God it wasn’t more” can be detected. The flood has almost drowned some departments.

Many long-time library users have gone out of their way to tell us that, whereas they once found excuses to put off going to the old building, they now do just the opposite. That feeling is precisely what the architects (the Tucson firm of Friedman & Jobusch) were striving for in a design which had to meet the functional needs specified in a 100-page building program supplied by the library staff. Simultaneously, it had to respond to University President John Schaefer’s requirement that the new building be a statement of the library’s role as the vital center of the intellectual community that is the university. On a campus composed mostly of traditional red-brick buildings, the 300,000- square-foot building, the largest on the main campus, is a landmark which uses red-brick accent walls, walkways, and lobby floors. Its structure is bare concrete, sandblasted to expose the darker, warmer tones of the native rock aggregate, and prepoured concrete slabs densely covered with brown pebbles which produce a color sensation somewhere between warm red brick and the native Sonoran Desert soil surrounding Tucson.

The building houses the library system’s major resources, except those in a separate science library facility less than a block away and smaller branch collections in music, oriental studies, and library science. As such it is the research and study home for perhaps 80 percent of all university readers. Its vital statistics do not tell the entire story. It contains a Media Center (to handle all nonbook materials except maps and microforms) and a current periodicals area (for public access to the current, unbound issues of some 4,000 titles), two services never before available in the library system. The building also includes specially designed quarters for the 150,000-item collection of maps.

Special user spaces include 186 lockable, faculty/graduate student studies and separate smoking, typing, and group-study rooms immediately adjacent to each section of the open stacks. The staff lounge includes both indoor and outdoor facilities to make maximum use of Tucson’s clear skies and warm weather year- round.

But the building is more than just a collection of spaces which happens to store and make possible the use of library materials. As Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. Wallace Stegner said in his dedication speech:

A library such as this is the storehouse of . . . amalgamation and cross-fertilization and adaptation. It is both a monument and an instrument. It binds Arizona and the Southwest to world civilization, assures it a place in the history of the mind, at the same time that it encourages the process of regional self definition.

It is better, they say, to collect a library than inherit one. In practice, those who love books cannot avoid doing both. This library looks both backward and forward, and in both directions all the lights are green.

—W. David Laird ■ ■

Univ. of Arizona Library exterior (above) and interior (below).

photos by Friedman and Jobusch