Join us October 23 to celebrate a notable milestone in the history of the UT Libraries: the thirtieth anniversary of the John C. Hodges Library.

30th Anniversary Celebration
Monday, October 23, 2017
Street Fair in the Commons—3-5 p.m.
Reception, 1st floor galleria—5:30 p.m.
Free and open to all

Two thousand seventeen marks the thirtieth year that the John C. Hodges Library has served as the main library for the UT Knoxville campus . . . that is, the John C. Hodges Library in its present incarnation, the striking ziggurat-shaped building familiar to current students and visitors to our campus.

The present John C. Hodges Library is, in fact, an expansion of the earlier building of the same name that stood at 1015 Volunteer Boulevard from 1969 until reconstruction commenced in 1984. That first building, officially the John C. Hodges Undergraduate Library, was built to deliver collections and services to the arriving wave of Baby Boomers.

By the 1980s, growing collections and new information technologies had begun to outpace the available space and infrastructure of the John C. Hodges Undergraduate Library. Campus planners wisely decided to expand the undergraduate library to create a new main library located at the center of the growing campus.

The new John C. Hodges Library opened in September 1987 with forty miles of book stacks and 1.1 million volumes. The new expansion essentially wrapped around the core of the older building and more than tripled the library’s square footage. The Hodges Library was at the time the largest and most modern library building in Tennessee.

Please join us to celebrate. Our evening reception on October 23 will feature music, refreshments, and remarks by:

• architect Doug McCarty, principal-in-charge of the 1987 expansion of Hodges Library
• Pauline Bayne, the librarian who planned the move of over a million books

The Elaine Altman Evans Exhibit Area in the first-floor galleria will unveil new displays including the original architects’ model for Hodges Library and a pictorial retrospective of “UT Then and Now.”

For more information about the October 23 celebration, contact Megan Venable (865-974-6903, mvenable@tennessee.edu).