Huie Library (1967)

From 1929 through 1967, Huie Library had occupied space in three different buildings. In 1967, however, Huie Library moved into a new structure all its own, an aim the College finally realized after setting that goal in 1929.

As the College continued to expand after World War II, Huie Library needed still greater space accommodations. And in October 1967, the Library made the big move to its first specially constructed building for its exclusive use. Of contemporary functional design similar to McBrien Hall, the new structure of red brick with white stone trim was near the front campus facing Arkansas Hall on the west, with Mooney Hall to the north, Proctor Hall to the east, and Henderson Street to the south.

In a special ceremony in Arkansas Hall, the College formally dedicated Huie Library at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, March 17, 1968. Following the dedicatory ceremony, the College sponsored tours of Huie Library and McElhannon Hall Annex, which was constructed at the same time to provide more classroom and laboratory space for courses in the sciences to alleviate crowded conditions in old McElhannon Hall.

Huie Library was now housed in a building that provided for 160 individual study stations and seating for over 700. The Library was designed "on a modular system using the bay system of arrangement", so that books were grouped by subject area with adjacent reading and study areas, and easy access to the open stacks. It had shelf space for approximately 150,000 volumes, more than enough to house the Library's 70,000 volumes moved from Arkansas Hall to the new building. To enable students and faculty to locate materials more easily, the Library posted copies of its master floor plan at accessible locations on each floor. The Library featured an arrangement of bays, materials, and services for the ease and comfort of its users.

A three-story air-conditioned building so constructed and situated to allow for additional wings as needed, the new Library contained 33,168 square feet of usable floor space. In this building, Huie Library housed its collection of books, bound and unbound periodicals, microfilms, and microcards. However, the Library did not house all of its inventory. The Fine Arts Center kept the music scores, records, art prints, and slides; and the Audio-Visual Center, located in Evans Hall, contained the movies.

While the new building gave evidence of the progress and development of the College, the Library's inventory demonstrated the progress and development of the Library. From a book collection of 41,650 volumes in 1960-61 to 85,875 in 1968-69, the Library had increased its book holdings over 106% in this nine-year period. In other print materials from 1961 to 1969, Huie Library recorded gains in the number of bound periodicals, from 4,390 to 7,073 for an increase of 61%, and the number of subscriptions to periodicals, from 334 to 810 for a gain of 142%. Besides the collection of print materials, Huie Library had also registered appreciable gains in its non-print holdings—records, slides, art prints, scores, microfilms, and microcards. From a collection of 1,003 microfilms and microcards in 1960-61, the Library had increased its collection of microforms by 2,624, a gain of 262%. In its entire collection of holdings, Huie Library had added 55,123 items during the 1960's for an increase of 108%.

During the 1960's, Huie Library continued to prove its worth to the area by the thousands of items circulated each year. The 605,136 books checked out accounted for 90% of the total circulation of 671,526. For each of these nine years, Huie Library circulated an average of 74,614 items in serving the students, the faculty, and the general public. This decade also saw the beginning of a cooperative agreement between the Ouachita and Henderson libraries, which made the resources of both libraries available to the students and faculty of both institutions.

By 1980, he collections total over 200,000 items with over 1500 serial subscriptions. To improve its service to patrons, the Library made further changes. Abandoning the bay system of arrangement for holdings, the Library kept all reference materials on the first floor; moved the book collection to the second floor, with the exception of the 900's, which joined all serials and microforms on the third floor. In 1979, Huie Library provided an Atrium Gallery for art and cultural exhibits in a remodeled section of the second floor. The Library had been connected to four computer systems. Two provided online literature searches: the Bibliographic Retrieval Systems, with over 30 databases; and the Lockheed-DIALOG, with over 100 databases. The third system was the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) which was used for bibliographic retrieval, cataloging, and interlibrary loan purposes. The fourth was H.S.U.'s on-campus computer that stored "the library's serial holding files". With this prescient investment in databases and computer systems, the Huie Library of the 1980s and 1990s strove to be "well positioned for the future of information retrieval which will require uses of new technologies and a shift from materials ownership to information access".

Huie Library also needed to protect its inventory of books because of losses during the 1970's. The Library Committee addressed this problem over a period of time. For a three-year span, the Library had suffered tremendous losses, which, at an average of $15 per book, amounted to an estimated $40,545 in 1976; $41,970 in 1977; and $30,570 in 1978. Finally, after discussions beginning in 1974 and with institutional funds available, a 3M Security System was installed in November, 1978, at a cost of $19,460. On December 8, 1978, the Oracle informed students of the new detector system that would sound "beep, beep" if they left with Library materials that had not been properly processed at the circulation desk. To prepare for the installation of the system, Library workers had inserted strips of magnetic tape in each book during the summer months. After the installation of the 3M Security System, the Library reported a decrease in book losses but a surging increase in the vandalism of materials, particularly of magazines and newspapers. The vandalism occurred, even though photocopying machines that made copies at ten cents each were available on the first and third floors.

In 1993, the College approved the construction of a two-story addition to the library. This new south wing retained the exterior design of the original building. The interior differed in that it featured drop ceiling tiles and painted walls rather than exposed brick. Enclosed study rooms were added to the second floor in 2009, and in 2019 a glass-walled computer classroom occupied the north wing of the first floor.