Organizational records, 1928, 1999, undated include: various library committee Meeting Minutes, agendas, and attachments, 1974-1984; Building Blueprints, etc., 1955-1981;’ Publications, B8udgets, Five-Year Plans, Reports, 1973-1987; Central Michigan Interlibrary Region (CMIR) Grants and Meeting Minutes, 1971-1975; Council of State College Undergraduate Library Directors Meeting Minutes, 1980-1983; Dept. of Instructional Resources (DIR) Meeting Minutes, Reports, Five-Year Plans, 1984-1983; and unpublished OCLS (Off-Campus Library Services) Conference materials, 1988-1999. Most of these materials came from Dean of Libraries Tom Moore’s office files while he was dean, but others were created and collected during the time John Weatherford was Director of Park, 1970-1988, with a few folders predating this. The collection is ongoing. It is organized by series, alphabetically by topic, and chronologically.
For additional information about the Park, see other, related collections documenting the history of the Park Library housed in the Clarke Historical Library.
Processing Note: Previously this collection was CMU.Park Library vertical files. Reference Point Newsletters are separately cataloged and housed as periodicals.
Organizational History:
Prior to the Park being built CMU’s library was housed in “Old Main” from 1893 until 1925, when the building burned to the ground. Reconstructed and new collections then moved to the east wing of Warriner Hall, then called the Administration Building, which was quickly outgrown. In February 1956 the Park and Clarke libraries moved to Ronan Hall. Due to expanding numbers of students and collections, CMU decided to build a new library which opened in 1969 at a cost of $4.2 million, partly funded by a federal grant. The library was named for Charles Park, who came to Central as head librarian in 1931 after being an assistant librarian at Stanford for fifteen years.
Construction and reconstruction of the Park library building began on April 21, 1999 with a ground breaking ceremony. The cost of the re/construction was $50,000,000. In the new building, usable floor space expanded from 130,000 square feet to over 205,000 square feet. The renovated structure included 2,500 network connections and over four hundred computer workstations. Storage space for volumes expanded from 550,000 to 1,300,000 volumes. New electronic moving shelves balanced efficient use of space with ease of use. The architects for the expansion were URS, Inc., and Woollen Molzan and Partners. During construction, Library personnel and collections were temporarily housed in Finch Fieldhouse, Rose 143, and parts of the Park Library during the construction. The new library opened in January 2002 and was formally dedicated in April 2002.
Revisions to the Park Library began in the spring 2016. The major focus of the renovations will be that part of second floor will become a “learning commons” area and reorganization of space due to the vastly decreased need to house physical volumes, especially periodicals in the digital age. (This information is from a compilation of Clarke webpages re: CMU library buildings.)