D. H. Hill Jr. Library
The D. H. Hill Jr. Library is one of two main libraries at North Carolina State University. It is the third building to house the NC State University Libraries, following Brooks Hall and Holladay Hall. The current building, situated on the Hillsborough Street edge of North Campus, is the result of four stages of construction, and houses the majority of the volumes in NC State's collection.
As of 2020, the system's total holdings amount to over 3.28 million available volumes, 122,839 electronic journal subscriptions, 511 print subscriptions, 685 bibliographic databases, and access to over 1.3 million electronic books. In the 2019–2020 academic year, the Libraries saw over 16 million total uses. The Libraries' collection is the smallest among the "Big 3" Universities in the Triangle Research Libraries Network—the other two library systems being Duke University and UNC at Chapel Hill.
Location
The library is situated on Hillsborough Street, on the north edge of campus. The main entrance is on the campus side, integrated into University Plaza. Prior to 1990, the library was also accessible from the Hillsborough Street side through the Erdahl-Cloyd Wing entrance; however, this entrance was closed that year due to financial and security considerations, as well as numerous complaints about heavy pedestrian traffic through this entrance, which opened into a study and reading area. In 2020, with the completion of major renovations to the library, the Hillsborough Street entrance was reopened.Name
D. H. Hill Jr. Library is named after Daniel Harvey Hill Jr., once part-time NC State librarian, and president of NC State in 1908. He was the son of the scholar and notable Confederate Army General Daniel Harvey Hill. The library's name did not include Jr. until May 2019, when it was changed to more accurately reflect that the library is named after D. H. Hill Jr. rather than his father.History of the NC State Libraries
D. H. Hill Jr. Library (Main Library)
Early years (1889–1926)
In December 1889, the University Board of Trustees authorized $650 for periodicals and books, which were placed in a single room in Holladay Hall. The collection was overseen by the university's first professor of English and future third chancellor, Daniel Harvey Hill Jr. Comprising 1,500 volumes by 1890, it reflected Hill's scholarly and literary interests instead of a purely scientific and engineering focus; indeed, the library was considered to be part of the Department of English. Through the 1890s, the collection primarily consisted of required reading materials for English courses taught by Hill and American and European history courses taught by Professor Alexander Holladay. The concept of a centralized library system was not considered; by 1893, the departments of agriculture, horticulture, mechanics, physics and mechanical and civil engineering had each developed their own reference collections separately from the primary library. The library moved to three rooms on the third floor of Main Building in the fall of 1897. In 1899, the University of Texas librarian, Benjamin Wyche, came as a consultant and introduced the Dewey Decimal System of classification, a card catalog and library cards; also that year, Edward Bentley Owen, a recent graduate of the college, was hired as librarian. In 1899, the collection totaled some 3,000 volumes, increasing to 3,500 volumes and 125 periodicals by the following year.In its first years, the library received little support. The annual library expenditure was $100 in 1892, raised to $400 in 1895. The maintenance budget remained below $1000 until 1925 and records of books borrowed and returned were recorded by hand in a large ledger. Not until 1902 would the first permanent University librarian, Marshall DeLancey Heywood, be hired; however, he resigned the following year after a cut in salary and was succeeded by Caroline Sherman, the first female librarian. A very particular librarian who served until 1906, she would go so far as to fumigate books returned from patrons who had contracted infectious diseases. In the fall of 1903, the library relocated to the ground floor of the old Pullen Hall, where it would remain for the next 22 years. Sherman reported directly to Professor Hill, who remained the permanent chairman of the university library committee and who continued to oversee the selection of books for the library. However, Hill also began subscribing to state newspapers, one for every county, and made them freely available to students for casual reading. He also had books arranged on open shelves to reduce the need for using the card catalog. Sherman was succeeded by Elsie Stockard, who served as librarian until June 1910. In 1908, Hill became the third president of State College, and relinquished his position as chair of the library committee. The new committee heads, English professors Thomas P. Harrison and George Sumney, initiated the process of asking department heads to recommend new books for the library. Under the supervision of Charlotte M. Williamson, librarian from 1910 to 1923, library holdings grew to 7,500 print volumes and 150 magazines and journals by 1911. However, library growth remained slow; the annual library budget continued to be about $500 during Hill's tenure as college president. By 1916, when Hill retired, the collection only numbered some 8,000 volumes, excluding materials in departmental libraries.
In October 1922, with the situation in a dismal state, a resolution was adopted by university alumni resolving that, "the Board of Trustees be asked to include in their recommendations to the Legislature of 1923 a request for an appropriation of $250,000 to build and equip a library capable of serving the needs of a greater and better North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering."
By 1923, the library's numerous deficiencies were all too clear; one dean later recalled the library "consisted of a half-dozen half-filled stacks. Nearly everything was hopelessly out of date." Following a report produced by a federal expert, the new college president, Eugene Brooks, hired James R. Gulledge as the first professionally trained head librarian. That fall, all materials in departmental libraries were brought under a central cataloging system as a part of the main library.
On December 28, plans were made to construct a new library building, for $227,500. While the library acquired its 10,000th volume in 1924, a fire destroyed the library catalogue the same year. As a result, the library classification system changed to the Library of Congress Classification, which remains in use through the present day. Inter-library loans were introduced in 1925. The new D. H. Hill Library opened with a limited schedule on October 15, 1925, opened with full service hours on January 1, 1926, and was dedicated on June 7, 1926. Built at a final cost of $266,500, including $25,000 for equipment, it was designed by New York architect Hobart Upjohn in a post-colonial style reminiscent of Monticello. The main reading room occupied the whole of the rear of the entrance hall; it and a separate periodicals room provided space for 250 readers, or about 20 percent of the college's total student population. The second floor was occupied by graduate student and faculty seminar and research rooms, while bookstacks with a maximum capacity for 150,000 volumes were housed in the basement. By this time, the main library collection totaled 15,000 volumes, which subsequently rose to about 18,000 following the integration of the various departmental libraries with the main collection. However, only 7,301 of the volumes in the collection were allowed to circulate, with the remaining 11,569 reserved for library use.
Gradual growth (1926–1959)
Despite the opening of the new library, the NC State College library system remained inadequate. In early 1926, an American Library Association report ranked the State library last among 50 land-grant institutions in terms of volumes held. Of the three major colleges and universities in the area, State's collection of about 15,000 volumes ranked well below that of the University of North Carolina's 150,000 volumes and Duke's 85,000 volumes. The average circulation of less than four books per student remained well below the average of 13 books per student reported by comparative institutions, while the library budget was only 10 percent of the lowest recommended percentage of an institution's annual library allocation. On March 8, the college Library Committee requested "each school faculty and the general College faculty consider these matters seriously, with a view of bringing this College up to a standard of at least a general average." In 1926, the library staff consisted of James Gulledge as head librarian, with Charlotte Williams as reference librarian, assistant librarian Agnes Cooper, assistant librarian Jeannette Burroughs, and seven part-time student library assistants.Gulledge left in the spring of 1926 to take up a position at Louisiana State University, and the position of librarian was eliminated. Instead, to save money, the college placed the library under the aegis of the Library Committee, with the intention of using the savings to purchase books. Frank Capps, the committee's executive secretary, was designated library supervisor, though he lacked the required qualifications. While the annual library expenditure had increased to about $3,000 by the early 1930s, library services remained poor. In 1931, the collection totaled 30,000 volumes. In 1933, the university collaborated with UNC and Duke University to form the North Carolina Union Catalog, the first shared catalog among the three universities. Capps resigned in July, and was briefly succeeded by the History chair Hugh Talmadge Lefler as acting library director before being replaced with William Porter Kellam on July 1 the following year.
The first professional Director in several years, and the first modern one, Kellam found the library in a chaotic state upon taking up his appointment; government publications and periodicals lay uncatalogued in the basement, faculty members were allowed to keep books indefinitely and academic departments had continued to purchase books and periodicals, but had generally neither cataloged them properly nor made them available to others. The student assistants who operated the library during nights and weekends were poorly trained, poorly supervised and often disorganized. To rectify the situation, Kellam centralized the acquisition of periodicals, increased the number of professional librarians on staff, nearly doubled the number of volumes in the collection and organized the library into five departments: circulation, reference, order, cataloging and periodicals. Each department was headed by a professional librarian. As a result, hours of service increased during evenings and weekends, faculty members were allowed to only keep borrowed materials for a year before having to renew them and a training program was instituted for student assistants. A browsing room opened in 1936 and the collection grew to 50,000 volumes in 1937. The University Archives were begun in the university's 50th anniversary year in 1939, and expenditures increased to $10,000 the same year; the number of current periodicals received by the library nearly doubled from 400 to 700. However, by the time Kellam left on August 31, 1939, the D. H. Hill Library building was found to be cramped and functionally obsolete. The library was no longer in the center of the campus, as the campus had expanded west over the previous decade. As Kellam concluded, "...the present library building was planned from an artistic point of view and not for efficiency and without benefit of a librarian's advice. The same mistake should not be repeated."
On September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out, Circulation Librarian Harlan Craig Brown was appointed as Kellam's successor. Appointed as the circulation librarian in 1936, he had helped to transform that area of library operations; during his 25 years as Director, he would oversee the transformation of D. H. Hill into a major university library. Library holdings reached 60,000 volumes in 1940. During the Second World War, all male library staff members entered the services, including Brown, who left for the army in November 1942. He served as an infantry captain in Europe. During his absence, reference librarian Reba Davis Clevenger served as acting Director, with a staff of six professional librarians and four others. In 1945, Clevenger and the Library Committee presented a report which highlighted three urgent needs: a new, centralized library building, a greatly increased book and periodicals budget and more and better-paid staff.
Brown resumed the library directorship on September 1, 1946. The Friends of the Library organization was formed on September 21, 1946, and library holdings reached 75,000 volumes by 1947 and 100,000 volumes in February 1949. During the immediate postwar years, the library struggled; the now-obsolete building only provided seating for four percent of the total student and faculty population. Library expenditures, while by now $75,000, remained inadequate to support a well-functioning library. Finally, the 1948–1949 North Carolina General Assembly approved $1.25 million to construct and outfit a new library building. Planning began in 1949, and the contract was awarded to Northup and O'Brien Architects of Winston-Salem on August 6, 1951. Construction of a new D. H. Hill Library to replace the outgrown building began in the spring of 1952, at the present location on the Brickyard. The new four-story brick and limestone library was completed in December 1953 and opened in the summer of 1954. It provided 900 seats for patrons, space for 400,000 volumes and the possibility of adding another two stories should the need arise. Bookstacks were closed to undergraduates, but were open to graduate students and faculty once they had been given a tour by the circulation librarian and received a stack permit. The library was formally dedicated on March 12, 1955, and the School of Design moved into the vacated library building.
A year after the opening of the East Wing, the Erdahl-Cloyd Student Union was built, occupying the present "West Wing" of the library. Library holdings reached 175,000 volumes in 1955, and reached 200,000 volumes by 1960. However, two major surveys conducted in 1954 and 1957 revealed the library to have fewer volumes per student than any other major North Carolina research college, a collection 50 percent smaller than those at other Southern land-grant colleges, undefined and inadequate coordination between the library director and the branch libraries, lack of coordination among the different technical departments within the library and a rigid and unhelpful system of closed bookstacks and stack permits. Finally, the college was found to only hold about 40 percent of materials which would be useful in the fields it served.