The History of the Library
on it's 75th Anniversary
The College Information Resource Center
1988-89 will be a year for celebrating the College’s 75th anniversary. As part of that celebration a special college catalog is being published which will feature photographs and short narratives describing each division, its history, its present program, and its future plans.
A condensed version of this history of the Fullerton College Library will be published in the anniversary catalog.
The William T. Boyce Library has been around! It’s traveled! There’s nothing static about this library! It’s moved five times in the last seventy-five years and continually kept up with technology! The library began soon after the college began in 1913, when it took over a small section in the Fullerton High School Library. That was a beautiful library of Spanish design which had been modeled after a famous library in Salamanca, Spain. It had pillars and arches and wrought iron chandeliers which had been forged in the high school metal shop. It was quite luxurious.
Then some years later in 1929 when the junior college had grown and there was even a Junior College Building on the high school campus the library made its first move, to a space of its own, though it wasn’t so luxurious. It was a barn-like room in what had been the high schools girls’ gymnasium. One of the two librarians of that year described it as a “high, huge, great big old building.” When she came to work in the morning she’d find “bats hanging from the ceiling,” which the custodian would have to catch in a net and remove before school started!
The Thirties was the era of the Great Depression, but even so the Fullerton Union High School and Junior College District was able to buy property just east of the high school which had been orange and walnut groves. Assisted by the Works Progress Administration, the district built three college buildings on this property which was the nucleus of the new college campus, the library was given space on the second floor of the “Science Building.” Today, it’s known as the North Science or 600 Building. So in 1938 the library moved for the second time.
This facility with its long study tables and blond furnishings was adequate during the World War II years when Fullerton College became virtually a small college for women. After the War, however, there was a population boom in Orange County and the student body numbers increased, and very soon all of the college facilities including the library, where the books and magazines were stacked on tables and chairs, were very cramped.
Beginning in the 1950’s and continuing through the 1960’s, the college district carried out a long-range construction project to meet the needs of the increased enrollment. This time the plans included a building which would house the library on the first floor, while rooms for social science and English classes would take up the second floor. It was completed in 1957 and the library made its third move, into these new quarters which had been designed as much as possible “like college reading rooms at UCLA or USC.” When the building was dedicated in October of that year Jessamyn West, the well-know author, who grew up in Orange County, was the guest speaker.
During all these years the library was known only as “the library”. It wasn’t until 1962 when it was given the more formal title of the “William T. Boyce Library” when the college honored the man who had come to the college in 1915 and was its dean and president from 1918 until his retirement in 1951.
The period of the Fifties and the Sixties was the era of the campus “Dress Code,”, no slacks or shorts could be worn by the women students, no shorts or cut-offs for the men students, and absolutely no one was allowed to go barefoot on campus. “Audiovisual” was becoming a popular library term, by which meant the records and players for music and foreign language listening; there was even modern automated circulation systems.
From Spanish décor, to bats on the ceiling, to overflowing bookshelves, to temporary quarters, to computer driven catalog and circulation systems, it’s been a good 75 years! There’s been nothing static about this library.
Last update:
October 7, 2010
