Our 30th anniversary celebration of the John C. Hodges Library was a great success!

Students thronged to our Street Fair in the Commons yesterday afternoon. The Libraries, the Office of Information Technology, and other Commons partners hosted booths at which they posed trivia questions in exchange for tickets to a prize drawing. Trivia quizzes harked back to the decade the expanded Hodges Library opened its doors. OIT, for instance, challenged guests to identify computer gear from the ‘80s.

Visitors to the Street Fair could experiment with virtual reality equipment from the Studio or play classic computer games like Pac-Man. At the end of the day, those who held winning tickets to our drawing took home handheld “retro” arcade games.

A reception and remarks followed the Street Fair. Among those offering remarks were Doug McCarty, the lead architect on the 1987 expansion of Hodges Library, and Pauline Bayne, the former UT librarian who planned and oversaw the move of more than a million books into the new library.

It was a day for celebrating with CAKE! A thousand cupcakes fueled the afternoon Street Fair. And the final ceremony of the day was cutting a cake shaped just like the Hodges Library (a masterpiece by Magpies Bakery).

Left: Yum! A Hodges-shaped cake.