Carnegie Library Centennial celebration planned for Oct. 4

Carnegie Library Centennial celebration planned for Oct. 4September 18, 2007Pamela McLaughlinpwmclaug@syr.edu

Syracuse University Library and the math department in The College of Arts and Sciences will host an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Carnegie Library on Thursday, Oct. 4, from 2-4 p.m. in the second-floor Reading Room. The theme of the event is “Celebrating 100 Years of Service to Faculty and Students.”

The celebration will include a reception, speakers, displays of rare mathematics books and historic photographs of Carnegie from its groundbreaking to the present and tours of the building. Featured speakers are Professor Emeritus Philip Church (math), University Librarian Emeritus David Stam and University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Suzanne Thorin.

Carnegie Library opened in September 1907 with a collection of 71,000 volumes. Funding for the project was secured by then-Chancellor James A. Day from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the construction of more than 2,500 libraries in the U.S., Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Fiji, Great Britain, New Zealand and Serbia between 1883 and 1929. For more on SU Library’s history, see Stam’s entry in the International Dictionary of Library Histories at http://library.syr.edu/publications/sulhistory.html.

The complete event schedule and associated materials can be found on the Carnegie Centennial web page located at http://library.syr.edu/information/scitechlib/carnegie100.