Creighton University

The library began its existence on January 13, 1880 when 20 boxes of books arrived. They had formed part of the Bardstown College library, and ever since that institution had been dissolved at the beginning of the Civil War, had lain in the basement of the old church at 9th street and Christy Avenue  in St Louis. As the theological department of the Missouri Province, for which these books had been destined by successive provincial superiors, showed no signs as yet of maturing, Ft. Higgins offered four thousand of them at dollar a piece to Creighton College. Fr. Sheffel then went to  St. Louis to make his selection. The classical part having been donated to St. Stanislaus Seminary, Florissant, Missouri, the theological and historical sections were the only ones left. Both have been pronounced very good for the time at which they were boxed up, the first, for example, containing the complete Latin and Greek Patrology by Migne.
Of the four thousand dollars, Mr. Creighton paid two, Fr. Higgins remitted one, and Fr. Shaffel paid the remaining one.

A room was then built on the third floor of the Main Building at the north end of its test [east? west?] corridor, where the present photographic dark room is, and fitted up with shelves along its walls. The books were placed on these and the Library was ready for use on February 14.

As this room could not be heated and was rather far from the living quarters of the faculty, the library was by October 27, 1885 removed to the second floor in front, over the south parlor. This is Room No. 242 in the present notation, the office of the college dean. Alcoves jutted out like buttresses, so that there was scarcely room on the floor for one table and a couple of chairs.

The students' library then began to grow. It was at first kept in glass cases in the southeast dais room on the second floor, the present chemistry lecture room. In May, 1899 it was transferred to the northwest room on the first floor, which then became also a reading room. Folding doors connected this room with the northeast one, which was used as a domestic chapel by the faculty. When these doors were opened along the whole length of the partition, the chapel was doubled in size and could be said to great advantage during retreats of the clergy.

It will be of interest to mention here in parenthesis that the space 50x60 feet between the front and rear corridors had been originally divided crosswise by glass partitions into four equal rooms on the first and second floors. On the third floor there was the large hall, with its ceiling 21 feet high, the height everywhere else being 14 feet. A glass door at the far end of each glass partition gave access from one room to another. The glass partitions running east and west were built like ordinary, although very wide, windows so that the lower half could be raised and the upper half lowered, and in this first arrangement one professor could keep studies in both classrooms at once. Of course, it goes almost without saying that the lower halves of the glass partitions were painted, and that the small boy soon scratched his peepholes in them. While these glass partitions had the advantage of light and of ventilation on warm days, they were objectionable on account of sound. The only remnant of these partitions to be seen today is in the chemical laboratory on the second floor in which the north one has been entirely removed and the other three only modified in a minor way.

To reach a west classroom one was obliged either to pass through an eastern one on his way, or to go up to the third floor or down to the basement or run around outside of the building. This soon proved to be very unpractical, especially so to Fr. Dowling. Within two weeks of the day he began his first term on July 18, 1885, a narrow corridor was sliced off the north rooms on the first floor in the middle of the building, the lower part of both partitions being built of wood and the upper of glass, the lower glass from one side being transferred to the top of the other. Later on the second floor was similarly treated, except that, strange to say and unpractical as it turned our, the corridor was run only half the length and cut out of the southwest room only, so that this necessitated passing through the southeast room to reach the western ones. This southeast room was used for a while as a physics lecture room and the cabinet crowded into the northeast one.

As the auditorium had made the large hall on the third floor of the main building unnecessary for public purposes, this hall was in July, 1907 divided into its present four rooms and its ceiling lowered from 21 to 14 feet. The same mistake, however, was made here as on the second floor, of cutting a corridor through only half the length, so that like some other of Fr. Dowling's works, this corridor had to be remade and continued through the whole length in July, 1924.

To come back to the Library. When its present quarters were erected during the great boom of 1902, the books were all transferred here by February 13 of that year. All the present alcoves on the ground floor were built at once, and every book could be reached without a ladder. These books at the time were by no means sufficiently numerous to fill the shelves, even exclusively of the upper level of the room, so that when a photograph was taken, they were all placed in visible positions, and it is a fair wager that the Library at the time did not contain more books than those visible on the photograph.

Books that were seldom or never used, such as those of the Congressional Record, were then brought down from their shelves in the southeast attic, but later on were crowded out of the Library again to the southwest attic. By the beginning of 1926 the Library had become so congested that four alcoves were built on the upper level.

The Library had always been devoted to the exclusive use of the faculty. But in 1921 it was thrown open to the students also. As space was at a premium, the central part of the Library itself was used by them as a reading room. This brought with it their direct access to the shelves, or to the stacks, as a librarian would express it.

The evils of this procedure soon made themselves felt in the mutilation and disappearance of books and in other ways. Accordingly by the summer of 1925, the large Assembly Hall on the first floor, from which its glass partitions had been removed as far back as 1902, and in which the students Library had been arranged along the south wall, was again divided, this time by an opaque partition, so that its eastern half became a study hall for the high school with the Students Library remaining along the south wall, while the western half was transformed into a reading room and made accessible from the west by means of an iron stairway on the outside. Access to the stack room was now no longer permitted, which as a few writers bemoaned and fought to regain this privilege in the college paper, the Creightonian.

It was also in 1921 or thereabouts that the books were put in charge of a professional librarian with several assistants, who could devote their whole time to the work. The library has thus been for some time thoroughly up to date, nor only in its management, but also in the purchase and donation of books, magazines etc.

In 1925 it was said to contain 31,000 volumes, besides Federal Government and State Publications. The Omaha Public Library, at 19th and Harney streets, with its 164,000 volumes, is also available to our students.