The layout of Memorial Library (now Hesburgh Library) was strongly influenced by the need to serve two distinct user populations in one building – the undergraduates and the graduate students. “Many institutions across the Unites States felt a need to develop a core academic collection that would support the undergraduate learning experience as distinct from the specialized research collection available in the rest of the library,” explains James Neal, Columbia University’s vice president for information services and former assistant director of the Hesburgh Libraries. In line with this trend, architects Ellerbe and Company designed a building with an eleven-story “Research Library” tower, which would sit above the two-story “College Library” base.
In his book Words of Life: Celebrating 50 Years of the Hesburgh Library’s Message, Mural, and Meaning, Bill Schmitt notes that resources and services were allocated throughout the building based on this model. The College Library had a capacity of approximately 200,000 core collection volumes in open stack access, and provided ample space for undergraduate students to gather and study. The tower floors housed the more specialized resources for the advanced research needs of faculty and graduate students, as well as seminar rooms, graduate student study carrels, specialized libraries, and offices for centers and institutes. The resources located in the Research Library were open to those undergraduates who had need for more in-depth research materials.
Throughout the 1970s, the undergraduate library concept began to fall out a favor. A large number of universities chose to integrate these separated collections. The idea that undergraduate students had distinctly different library needs was discounted. Undergraduate curriculums and teaching methods were changing, and advantages were seen in encouraging all students to work within the full scope of resources available in a research library. Financial pressures were also a significant factor – university libraries were increasingly unable to support the extensive duplication in materials and services required to maintain an effective undergraduate library.
In response to questions raised by the College Library Department, a College Library/Undergraduate Services Committee was commissioned in 1979 to study the needs of the undergraduate students for library resources, services, and instruction. Surveys of undergraduates and faculty done by the committee reflected clear support for a unified collection, with the majority of faculty indicating that “the college Library or any separate undergraduate collection is unnecessary or detrimental.” The existence of a separate College Library collection was identified by library faculty and staff as the main factor behind an increasing number of problems in helping patrons locate materials in Memorial Library. The final committee report noted, “Even if a convincing argument could be developed for upgrading the College Library facility at Notre Dame, the required fiscal and staffing support would only come at the expense of other pressing library collection and service needs.” The group recommended that the College Library collection be eliminated, and that the library reorganize the collections “in a rational and clear way so that patrons can successfully locate the materials they need with minimum inconvenience.”
The reorganization of the collection was carried out over the summer of 1981 and completed by the start of the fall semester. The remainder of the general collections were realigned throughout the rest of the building. Library Director Robert Miller noted in his annual report, “To achieve this we moved, at least once and in some cases several times, almost one million volumes in the collections.” This change was well received, and the principles of that collection reorganization persist today.
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