 Newsletter Number 49, Summer 2002 The University of Texas at Austin www.lib.utexas.edu |
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Perry-Castañeda
Library celebrates 25 years of service |
Then and now This issue of our newsletter celebrates an anniversary. It also celebrates twenty-five years of growth and change—new ways of accessing more information and new services to help users find, evaluate, and use that information. The year was 1977. The best selling work of fiction was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. The best selling work of non-fiction was Alex Haley’s Roots. The top music single for that year was Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” with Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” also doing well on the charts. And the movie Annie Hall was inspiring a fashion trend. It was the year that a new company called Apple Computer introduced its Apple II model in an innovative plastic case (1 Mhz speed; HD: none; motherboard RAM: 4k; ROM 12k; floppy: optional; six-color display) for $1,298. That spring Dr. Lorene L. Rogers, President of UT Austin, had appointed Harold Billings Acting Director of General Libraries. A formal search for a permanent director was initiated a few weeks later with Prof. Lewis Gould of the History Department heading the committee. On August 16, 1977, Elvis died. Less than two weeks later the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) opened. Later that fall Earl Campbell won the Heisman Trophy. The Perry-Castañeda Library was named in memory of a distinguished
African American and a distinguished Mexican American, both UT Austin
faculty members. They were Dr. Ervin S. Perry, a promising young associate
professor of civil engineer ing who was named to receive the National
Society of Professional Engineers’ first |
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 “Young
Engineer of the Year” award in 1970, the year of his death; and
Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda, a noted professor of Latin American history
who helped build UT Austin’s internationally known Latin American
(now the Nettie LeeBenson Latin American) Collection. Dr. Castañeda
died in 1958.
The flowers that graced the Information Desk on the day of opening were a gift from the Graduate School of Library Science. Three years under construction, the six-level, open-stack facility was designed to serve as the main library of UT Austin with its seventy miles of shelves. It serves most subject fields but emphasizes the humanities, the social sciences, business, education, nursing, social work, and European, East European, Asian, Middle Eastern, Hebraic, and Judaic studies. The new facility had 500,673 gross square feet of floor space (four times the space in the old Main Library). It also included nine acres of sound-deadening carpeting on the floors. Total cost for the project was $21.7 million.
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