The Valley Library

Origins Oregon State University was established in 1868. 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. In 1887, the library was established at the school, and in 1890, May Warren was hired as the first full-time librarian. By 1893, the library's collection had grown to 1,950 volumes. The library collection continued to grow and totaled 36,478 volumes in 1918. By 1922 the collection had grown to 73,000 volumes, and Lucy M. Lewis served as the school's librarian. By 1940, the collections at the library had increased to a total of about 130,000 volumes and 1,400 serials. 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. Oregon Agricultural College opened a new library in 1918, marking the first time that the library had its own building. Prior to 1918, the library had been housed on the second floor of the neighboring Administration Building, now known as Benton Hall. When the new building was completed, the school built a temporary trellis between the two buildings in order to more easily transfer the books to their new location. The new library was remodeled on several occasions, with a new wing added in 1941. the same architect who designed the original structure. 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. She donated a total of over 1,000 items that included a complete works of Abraham Lincoln valued at $4,800. The library received a bequest of about 5,500 volumes valued at about $15,000 in December 1947 from William H. Galvani's estate. This donation overtook that of McDonald to become the largest received by the library up to that time. Kerr Library The school's library collection grew to 193,479 volumes in 1943. Previously known simply as The Library, the building and library were renamed in 1954 as the William Jasper Kerr Library. In May 1960, the then Oregon State College was advanced $19,000 by the federal government to plan for a new $2.17 million building. Ground was broken on the project on May 1, 1962, with Shields Construction Company as the general contractor for the project. The new building would double the size of Oregon State's library. its present location, and the name was transferred from the old building. 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. Oregon State began construction in the Fall of 1970 to add these new floors, with completion coming in the Fall of 1971. Previously, Fairbanks Hall had carried the moniker of Kidder Hall, starting in 1927. Rodney K. Waldron served as the head of the library from 1954 until 1984. 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. The Valley Library The collections of the library continued to grow, reaching 1,275,473 volumes in 1993. In 1999, the building was renamed as The Valley Library after an extensive expansion and renovation. Renovations took three years and cost $47 million to complete. 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 readers, pre-loaded with a library of e-books. 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. 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. ==Facilities==

The Valley Library is a six-story, rectangular building with a rotunda on the east side. 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. The main floor, which is the second floor, includes a two-story atrium, the circulation desk and information desk, a student multimedia studio, computer stations, and a 3D printing station. The undergraduate writing studio is housed on the second floor of the Valley Library, after moving from its previous location in Waldo Hall in fall 2017. The third floor contains collections of atlases, government documents, microforms and readers, and hosts the Mole Hole's chemistry tutoring services. The south end of the fourth floor houses the library's offices, including library administration, central web services and the Division of Extended Campus. A media collection and the Special Collections and Archives Research Center are located on the fifth floor. The sixth floor is a silent study area for graduate students and only covers the southern two-thirds of the structure. Directly north of the building is the Library Quad, originally known as the East Quadrangle. A bell tower, or campanile, was added on the eastern edge of the quad in 2001. Dedicated to alumnus H. Dean Papé, the tall tower has five bells and a clock. ==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. The other two libraries are the Marilyn Potts Guin Library at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport and the library at the Cascades Campus in Bend. Faye Chadwell is the University Librarian as well as the OSU Press Director. at graduation in 1922 As of 2008, the libraries, combined, employed about 120 people (FTE), of which 23 were librarians. 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. 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. Separate from the library, the school is also home to the Linus Pauling Institute. Other collections in the Special Collections and Archives Research Center include the Atomic Energy and Nuclear History Collections that contains of items, the McDonald Collection with 2,680 items that date back as far as 2000 BC, two collections concerning the history of science, and 30 linear feet in the Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogues, among others. 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. The Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives is also housed within the Special Collections and Archives, which collects materials related to hops and brewing within the Northwest. 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. 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. ==References==