A campaign to raise at least $30 million in private gifts for the University Library was announced Oct. 10 during the UI Foundation’s 68th annual meeting on the Urbana-Champaign campus and during a dedication ceremony at the library to mark its 10 millionth volume.
The multi-year fund drive focuses on gifts for current use and those to be invested in endowment to provide support in perpetuity in three general areas: collections, people and preservation.
“The library is critical to every one of the core missions of the university – teaching, scholarship, the making of future citizens, and the university’s engagement with the broader community, here and around the world,” said Chancellor Nancy Cantor.
In the area of collections enhancement, campaign contributions will help to maintain the traditionally strong collections in the main library and the 41 departmental libraries on campus, help acquire material in emerging areas of teaching and research interest, and strengthen access to electronic, digital and other non-print resources.
The campaign hopes to also ensure that the library’s collections will remain available years from now. The future of both print and digital materials is at risk because of the instability of the media on which they are contained. Nearly 40 percent of the Library’s holdings are in danger of deterioration. The preservation priority of the campaign seeks to conserve valuable artifacts from among the more than 22 million items contained in the library, to treat endangered materials to prevent further damage, to reformat content of unsalvageable items to other media, and to install environmental controls to slow the rate of deterioration of materials.
As the largest public university library in the world, the UI Library is respected for the strength of its collections and the personalized services of its librarians.
The University Library campaign seeks to enhance faculty and provide salary and research funding in perpetuity by establishing named endowed chairs for positions such as University Archivist and Preservation Librarian, named distinguished professorships for heads of departmental libraries and for library faculty specialists to promote research in specific disciplines, and to create new endowed positions to advance the use of special collections in research and teaching.
Libraries today must provide the facilities necessary to support growth in collections and accommodate the current group study and individual learning styles of students. Through the campaign, the campus seeks to match the quality of library facilities with the quality of its collections. Facilities development priorities include renovation of the main library building, including the Reference and Circulation rooms, the Stacks, the University Archives and the area studies libraries. Private gifts also are sought to reconstruct and renew the Undergraduate Library, the Chemistry Library located in the 100-year-old Noyes Laboratory, as well as other departmental libraries. Most of the departmental libraries, according to UI officials, are small based on campus standards.
“The success of the library campaign is central to the future of this great institution and our ability to effectively serve faculty members, students, citizens of Illinois, and scholars worldwide,” said Paula Kaufman, university librarian.
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