The first campus library opened on the second floor of Alpha Hall without any books. Friends of the College quickly began donating books and paying for magazine subscriptions.
Elizabethtown College, Class in penmanship in Commercial Room of Rider Memorial Hall, 1906. Instructor at left is J. Z. Herr, later business manager and treasurer of College for 28 years.
The first two students to sign up for the College’s four-year Bachelor of Arts program were Lewis D. Rose and Ralph W. Schlosser. Rose became one of Elizabethtown’s first College Librarians. Schlosser later served as a Professor of English and as President of the College.
The library was moved to Rider Hall, originally Memorial Hall, the second building constructed on campus.
A reading room was added to the Rider Hall library, expanding student study space. In Our College Times, the College newspaper, students advocated for better library resources.
Video footage of the College commencement ceremony held May 24, 1943. This video is part of the Video and Audio Collection in the Hess Archive.
Plans to build a new library were put on hold by the Great Depression, but fundraising was revived in the early 1940s. The groundbreaking for a new facility took place on April 19, 1949.
Named in honor of Samuel R. Zug, the Zug Library was dedicated on October 20, 1950. While the College owned only 16,500 volumes at the time, the new library was built with space for over 50,000 volumes.
The library adopted an open stacks system which allowed students to retrieve books from the shelves and to browse the collection without making specific requests.
Wings were added to Zug, expanding the library's capacity to 100,000 volumes for a student population of up to 1,200.
Audio recording of an Alumni Lecture Series presentation by Dr. Ralph W. Schlosser during the 1968 Spring Weekend's Alumni Day/May Day on May 4th, 1968.
Miss Anna Carper and college President Morley Mays receiving books from the Lancaster Synagogue in 1974.
With the help of a generous donation from the High Foundation of Lancaster, the College began construction of the High Library on March 14, 1989. Library Director Nelson Bard and the entire library staff were active in the design process.
The High Library was dedicated on September 22, 1990, and named in honor of S. Dale High, a 1963 graduate of the College.
Students, faculty, staff, and community members paid more than 103,000 visits to the High Library in its inaugural year. During the 2014-2015 academic year, the number of visits surpassed 148,000.
The year after the High Library opened, the College owned only four databases on CD-ROM. Today, the High Library offers 70 databases on a range of subjects. During the 2014-2015 academic year, the College community performed over 785,000 searches in these databases.
Audiovisual resources have changed dramatically in the past 25 years. When the High Library opened, only a handful of VHS cassettes were available for checkout. Today, DVDs, CDs, and streaming media have replaced VHS and reel-to-reel formats.
Barcodes were added to the library’s books during Spring Break, and then the electronic catalog went live. On October 20, 1992, the staff removed the paper card catalog.
The library’s first smart classroom, the McCormick Research Laboratory, was completed on August 16, 1999. The library is currently planning for the addition of a second smart classroom, which is slated to open in Fall 2016.
Eleni Gage and Peter DePuydt pose in the Elizabethtown College High Library after Ms. Gage's discussion of her book "North of Ithaka" on March 29, 2006. Click the "Find out more" button below to view a video of the discussion.
In honor of the High Library’s 20th anniversary, Library Director BethAnn Zambella inaugurated the Anna Carper Excellence in Library Research Award. Anna M. Carper, a 1941 graduate of the College, served as College Librarian from 1960 to 1986.
The Elizabethtown College yearbook was known as the Etonian from 1922-1950, it then changed its name to the Conestogan in 1951. The yearbooks were digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS members and the Sloan Foundation. Click the "Find out more" button below to view the full archive.
In 2011, the library began to offer its popular “Text a Librarian” service.
The High Library was one of 40 sites across the country to host “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible”, a traveling exhibition from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Another national Folger exhibition featuring a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio will come to the High Library in November 2016.
Combining the rare book and archival collections of the High Library’s Brethren Heritage Room and the College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, the Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections was constructed during the summer of 2014 and dedicated on November 3, 2014.
Today, the High Library serves not only as a place to access information but as a campus hub and community space. During the regular semester the library is open for more than 105 hours a week, most days until 1:00 a.m.
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