In the beginning, when Eastern was still a small “normal” school for the training of teachers, the library was located in the southwest corner of the first floor of Old Main. Housed in two rooms with a total area of 2,170 square feet for collections, staff, and patron use, the 2,500 volume library at first seemed spacious. With the passage of time, however, and the growth of the collection and student population, library director Mary Josephine Booth began a campaign to build a separate library building. In the 1940s her efforts were rewarded at last, when Eastern was granted funds to erect such a structure. On February 2, 1948, Ms. Booth—by then retired—officially broke ground on the library building, which was later named in her honor and dedicated on May 27, 1950.
Scarcely a dozen years later, however, when the book collection had expanded to 114,000 volumes, administrators realized that the library building needed to expand. When approval was finally given for the library annex in 1967, the collection had grown still more, and the student enrollment at Eastern had begun to surge upward. The annex was completed in 1968, giving the library an estimated stacks capacity of 475,000 volumes.
In succeeding decades even this greatly increased capacity was seen to be inadequate for a burgeoning library collection of over 600,000 volumes and a student population of over 10,000. The state finally gave its approval, in the mid 1990s, for a much-needed renovation and expansion of Booth Library. Construction began in 1999, and, when completed in 2002, the library’s book capacity was increased to approximately 1,500,000 volumes, and its infrastructure was prepared for the challenges of the 21st Century.
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