History of the Mabee-Simpson
Library
Half of the first
Graduating class at Arkansas College.
Standing: Charles Maxfield.
Seated: Susie Butler (Lawrence),
Will Patterson, and Mary Maxfield (Fitzhugh)
Lyon College’s library has come a
long way since 1872. Just like everything else in the early years
of life at tiny Arkansas (now Lyon) College, the library was a small
affair in the nineteenth century.
For the first twenty years of the college’s existence the official
college "library" was maintained in the office of the president, while
the literary societies oversaw their own small libraries and the faculty
provided a "reading room" of current periodicals inside one of the
classrooms. The Isaac J. Long Memorial
Building, completed in1893,contained one room devoted to the college's
growing library of about two thousand volumes. In 1921, Erwin Gymnasium
was remodeled and transformed into a library building, and Irene Ferrill
was hired as the college’s first full-time librarian, a job that in
previous decades had been occupied by a succession of junior faculty
members. (The Erwin Library is now the fellowship hall of the First
Presbyterian Church.) Mrs. Ferrill re-classified the library’s holdings
according to the duodecimal system and oversaw a growing cadre of students
who worked part-time in the library. By 1923, the library’s holdings had
grown to 7,500 volumes. By the mid-1920s, Mrs. Ferrill and her students
had re-classified the library once again, this time using the new Dewey
Decimal system that was becoming the standard for institutions of higher
education.Difficult
financial times at the college in the latter part of the 1920s and the
1930s hit the library particularly hard. The too-small library became one
of the roadblocks to successful accreditation, and one inspector in the
late 1930s referred to the library as "deplorable". By World War II,
library spending had almost completely dried up. But the college quickened
its path toward accreditation and the development of a modern college
library after the war, taking an important first step with the hiring of
Dorothy Sydenstricker as librarian in 1948.
Mrs. Sydenstricker was the first
Arkansas College librarian with university
training in library science and would remain at the college for
twenty-five years. With the move to the present campus in May 1954, the
middle building of the three old Masonic buildings (later named Long
Memorial) became the site of the new library, although the building also
housed the chapel, post office, and bookstore. The 1950s and 1960s
witnessed tremendous growth in the library’s holdings, much of it due to
annual grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the development of
the college’s first interlibrary loan agreement with a group of other
independent colleges known as the Arkansas Foundation of Associated
Colleges (AFAC). This picture of Mrs. Sydenstricker is from the 1972
Scot.
The
current library structure, originally called the Mabee Learning Resources
Center but renamed the Mabee-Simpson Library after a major renovation in
1994-95, was completed in 1968. At that time the library’s holdings
amounted to less than 50,000 volumes. Lyon College’s library has undergone
significant changes since the arrival of current director Dean Covington
in 1988. In 1990-91, the library made the conversion from a traditional
card catalog to a computerized catalog, one whose holdings are now
classified according to the Library of Congress system. The renovation of
the facilities in the mid-1990s roughly doubled the size of the library,
providing more space for bound periodicals, staff offices and work areas,
and student study rooms. By the end of the decade the number of
holdings was nearing the 150,000-volume goal set by the Strategic Plan. In
addition, the vast improvements in interlibrary loaning and the blossoming
of on-line databases and services promised to revolutionize library use in
the new millennium.
-written by
Dr. Brooks Blevins,
Associate Professor of History, Lyon College
Contact
The
Mabee-Simpson
Library, Lyon College
2300 Highland Road, Batesville, AR 72501
Front desk (870) 307-7205
Interlibrary Loan (870) 307-7505
Last Maintenance: Jan 14, 2008
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