At the “Busy Campus Crossroads”: the Last Fifty Years at Raymond H. Fogler Library

Keeping pace with an “overwhelming explosion of knowledge and information” has been a particular challenge for those at Raymond H. Fogler Library since the university celebrated its centennial in 1965. The technologies for the storage and delivery of information have seen unprecedented rates of innovation, acceptance, and obsolescence. Acquiring appropriate materials has necessitated a close look at changing needs of faculty, increasingly specialized programs, university budget freezes, shifting alignments with other libraries in the University of Maine System, and increasing costs of many subscription journals and databases. Even as electronic access has become prolific, libraries continue to be viewed as important physical spaces and efforts to increase seating capacity have been ongoing. At the core these changes, both physical and digital, remains an effort to serve the needs of academic and statewide communities and reflect the principal mission of a land-grant institution. To the extent that the establishment of land-grant institutions has been equated with increased American egalitarianism and democratization, similarly, libraries have been viewed as having the capability of providing broader access to knowledge and an opportunity for anyone to pursue educational goals and to become a more informed, productive citizen. Desirée Butterfield-Nagy is an archivist in the Special Collections Department at the University of Maine’s Raymond H. Fogler Library. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives & Preservation from the University of South Carolina, and has been with the Department since 2009