A naming ceremony for the new library at Rogers State University will be held at 11 a.m. Monday, Oct. 27. The public is invited to attend.
The ceremony will be held just east of the new library on the RSU campus in Claremore. Parking will be available near the Bushyhead Field House and the present library facility.
The event will feature several speakers, including University of Oklahoma President David Boren; U.S. Rep. Brad Carson; Oklahoma Higher Education Chancellor Paul Risser; Sen. Cal Hobson, President Pro Tempore of the Oklahoma Senate; Rep. Larry Adair, Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives; G.T. Blankenship, Chairman of the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents, the governing board for RSU; and Jessica Clark, President of the RSU Student Government Association.
The OU Board of Regents will hold its monthly meeting on the RSU campus in Claremore on Monday and will consider a formal resolution naming the new library. RSU President Dr. Joe Wiley will read the resolution at the ceremony, revealing the name of the new $4.4 million library. The name of the library will remain a surprise until that time.
The three-story library building contains about 45,000 square feet, with the library occupying about 30,000 square feet on the building’s second and third floors. The first floor will contain classrooms and faculty offices. The new building is located adjacent to the RSU Student Apartments and will be a focal point for students, faculty and campus visitors.
The new library is expected to open in January. The library’s collections will be moved into the new facility during the holiday break without causing interruption to its services.
The new library will more than double the size of the current facility, which has increased its collection by more than 15,000 titles during the past three years in order to meet the needs of Oklahoma’s fastest-growing university.
The new facility not only will include expanded student seating and study areas, but will also contain reading rooms on the second and third floors, a classroom, meeting rooms, and consolidated offices for library staff. Another planned feature is a coffee bar adjacent to the reading room on the second floor. This feature is intended to make the facility user-friendly and encourage students and other patrons to fully explore the library resources.
Since RSU became a four-year institution in 2000, the library has expanded its holdings by about 5,200 titles annually. The library contains more than 61,000 books, 534 current periodical subscriptions, 4,500 videos, 23,400 electronic audio books, and 1,200 CDs. The library also offers full access to the Internet and a wide variety of databases offering access to research and mass media texts.
To meet the library’s needs, RSU’s book-buying budget has been about $230,000 annually. In fiscal year 2002, RSU’s book acquisition budget ranked behind only OU and OSU among the state’s public universities.
The library’s collection includes publications that date to the 1890s, including materials from the institution’s earliest beginnings as Eastern Oklahoma Preparatory Academy, which was founded in 1909.
The collection also has presidential memoirs autographed by U.S. Presidents Herbert Hoover (“The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover” by Herbert Hoover), Harry Truman (“Mr. Citizen” by Harry Truman), Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Crusade In Europe” by Dwight Eisenhower) and Lyndon B. Johnson (“The Lyndon Johnson Story” by Booth Mooney). The library also holds books autographed by Robert Kennedy, William Manchester, Lawrence Welk, Eric Sevareid, and Lynn Riggs.
The library currently occupies a 14,000-square-foot building that once housed the student union for the Oklahoma Military Academy, which was RSU’s predecessor institution. The library moved into the building in 1976 and the facility has not been expanded since that time.
Funding for the new facility was provided through a 1999 legislative appropriation. The new library was designed by Graber & Imel Architects of Tulsa, with construction by Loerke Construction Group of Tulsa.
For more information on the library naming ceremony, call (918) 343-7773.