In the new millennium, electronic reference services continued to grow, with incoming email reference questions nearly doubling to 1,355 questions in 2000-01, and doubling again to 2,650 in 2001-02. February to May of 2001 also saw the testing of…

During this period, computers and later the internet had a growing presence in the library and reference services. The first reference areas to be impacted from computer automation were bibliographic searching and the library catalog. In 1976-77,…

Twenty-five years after the construction of the new library building, the use of space in the Reading Room continued to change with the library. A Periodicals Section opened at the south end of the Reading Room on November 22, 1954. This brought…

The reference department moved into the Reading Room in the new library building (the current Main Library) in September 1926, although the rest of the library remained in Altgeld Hall for the remainder of that semester. In the earliest years of the…

In September 1897 the first dedicated library building, now known as Altgeld Hall, opened with the first professionally trained librarian of the university as its head and the first dedicated reference librarian on its staff. There were two reading…

BUILDING HISTORY: Grainger Library was built on October 14, 1994 and was dedicated to all of the disciplines of the school of engineering at the University of Illinois. Before Grainger Library was built another building stood in its place. Over…

The University Library was founded with the charter that established the Illinois Industrial University in 1867. The Board of Trustees designated $1,000 to purchase 644 books to start the library. These books were first housed in the office of…

This intriguing bronze group harmonizes perfectly with the other outdoor pieces placed along the same street: Basaldella's Initiation and Youngman's Centennial. All evoke a sense of archaeological discovery, of mysterious meaning, of…

At the invitation of President Andrew Draper, Katharine Lucinda Sharp (1865-1907) came to the university in the fall of 1893 to establish a professional library program and to build a major library. For four years prior to that, she had occupied a…

The grimly earnest, realistic figural group cast in bronze from this original plaster stands in a park in Taft's birthplace, Elmwood, lllinois. At the base is the inscription, "To the Pioneers / Who bridged the streams / Subdued the soil…

Dr. Thomas Gallaudet founded the first free school for the deaf in the United States, the American School for the Deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. He is shown in this naturalistic sculptural portrait with Alice Cogswell, the child who…

Beautifully tinted glass designs, colored primarily in soft grays, browns, and ambers and representing the marks of printers in France, Italy, Scotland, England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, embellish twenty-seven of the library's…

Four impressive Art Deco murals over the Library's main interior staircases represent, in allegorical, historical, and exotic figures, the Polar, Celestial, Eastern, and Western Hemispheres. That was not the way it was meant to be. For the…

To its planners, the first university library building, now Altgeld Hall, was an especially significant structure, tangible evidence that the industrial college of 1868 had been transformed into a respected institution of higher education. Of all…