In this edition of #ElonTBT, we celebrate Carol Grotnes Belk Library as it turns 20 years old on Jan. 31.
In the #ElonTBT series, the Elon University News Bureau, along with Archives & Special Collections, will flash back to the past to take a look at Elon over the years. You will find videos, newspaper clippings, photos and more to celebrate Elon’s past, while looking ahead to the future. Follow along on Today at Elon and the university’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages every Thursday to see what we dig up.
The campus community is celebrating its home for library and media services for the past two decades, as Carol Grotnes Belk Library turns 20 years old in January.
Belk Library officially opened as the fourth library in Elon’s history on Jan. 31, 2000, but its story began nearly three years prior.
During a November 1997 meeting of Elon’s Board of Trustees, members announced the beginning of the $40 million Elon Vision campaign. The campaign included plans for a new library to replace McEwen Library, which had served the community since 1968.
“Today, the McEwen Library is bursting at the seams,” said then-President Fred Young during the new library’s groundbreaking on March 11, 1998. “We are ready for a new heart for our campus.”
A photo from the groundbreaking ceremony for Belk Library on March 11, 1998.
Belk Library under construction in the late 1990s.
Belk Library nears completion in 1999.
President Emeritus Leo M. Lambert dedicates Belk Library during a ceremony in September 1999.
An image of Belk Library following its opening on Jan. 31, 2000.
An image of the technological offerings inside Belk Library in 2000.
An image of Moseley Center (left) and Belk Library (right) as students walk through Young Commons.
The groundbreaking ceremony was part of a special College Coffee that also marked Elon’s 109th birthday. Students, faculty and staff gathered in the parking lot that would soon become the location of the new library. Four balloons placed in separate corners of the lot represented the footprint of the $14 million building.
“Today is a celebration, a major highlight in the history of Elon College,” Young told the crowd.
On Sept. 15, 1999, the day of his inauguration, incoming President Leo M. Lambert dedicated the building, which he called the “crown jewel” of the Elon Vision. Lambert announced the building would be named after Carol Grotnes Belk of Charlotte, North Carolina, in recognition of contributions she made wither her husband, businessman and philanthropist Irwin Belk, to the Elon Vision campaign.
Lambert proposed a symbolic gesture to prepare the new library for its grand opening. On Jan. 16, 2000, students, faculty and staff created a human chain to transport a select collection of books from McEwen Library to the front entrance of Belk Library. It was a nod to the human library chain of 1968 in which the Elon community transported the entire book collection from Carlton Building to McEwen Library in exchange for steak dinners.
“People lined up from McEwen to Alamance, around Fonville Fountain and across Haggard Avenue to Belk,” according to the Feb. 3, 2000, edition of The Pendulum student newspaper. “Dr. J. Earl Danieley was at the start of the chain and Dr. Leo Lambert was the final link.”
The chain also included catalogue librarian Ann Vickers ’61, who joined the library staff in 1966 and was the only librarian to work at Carlton, McEwen and the new library.
Once completed, Belk Library measured 75,000 square feet, more than two and a half times larger than McEwen, which is now part of the School of Communications.
Belk opened with 148 computers in two computer labs, a first-floor common area, 21 study rooms and 570 seats. The library also brought Elon’s tutoring and writing centers and media services under the same roof. The opening of the library also came with new technological capabilities, according to “From a Grove of Oaks: the Story of Elon University,” written by the late-university historian George Troxler.
“Students plugged their personal computers into connections on the study carrels and tables or in the library’s study rooms, or they checked out wireless laptops from media services to connect to the Internet anywhere in the building via antennas on the laptops and a radio transmitter on each floor,” Troxler wrote.
Today, Belk houses more than 300,000 books, 31,000 e-books, 51,000 journals, and a variety of other resources for the campus community.
Do you have any special pieces of Elon history? Share your photos and videos with us via email at news@elon.edu or using the hashtag #ElonTBT on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.