As the renovation of the McGoogan Library approaches, it’s interesting to look back at the beginning of the medical library at UNMC to see how far we have come. Over the last 100 years, the library has moved and changed with the growing needs of UNMC students and faculty.
In 1913, Poynter Hall was the first building constructed for the College of Medicine. The library was located on the third floor of Poynter Hall, open for just four hours each day. In 1917, the library moved to the second floor of University Hospital Unit I and was then open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. The collection was comprised of 12,000 volumes and 135 journal titles.
In 1927, the library moved into the newly built University Hospital Unit II on the first and second floors of the north wing. The first floor housed a reading room with capacity for 100 readers and book stacks with space for 40,000 books. The first floor also housed the librarian’s office and seminar room. A staircase connected the seminar room to an additional room on the second floor. The second floor also housed a receiving room and bindery.
Because there was no elevator to move book carts, an old dumbwaiter was installed as a book lift between the first and second floors. The space for the library in University Hospital Unit II was intended to be temporary. The unit wings were initially designed as hospital wards and were not intended to meet the needs of a library. The lighting and temperature controls were poor, which was harmful for the preservation of books.
By 1965, this “temporary” library was overflowing with 130,000 books and journals, including titles for the College of Nursing, which was the start of the addition of other colleges to the library. The University of Nebraska College of Medicine Dean Cecil Wittson, M.D., advocated for a campus building plan which included a new library building. In 1968, Dr. Wittson and library director Bernice Hetzner were granted a $1.6 million Federal Medical Library Assistance grant to construct a new building. Leon S. McGoogan, M.D., raised an additional $385,000.
The new library opened in July 1970 on the top of the Basic Science Building, adding three new floors to the building now known as Wittson Hall. The new library had a staff of nearly 50 and seating for 330 people. By this time, the collection had grown to 160,000 volumes and more than 2,400 journal titles. The library provided state-of-the-art equipment such as slide projectors, filmstrip projectors, and 8mm motion picture projectors.
In 1980, the Library was named in Dr. McGoogan’s honor. In 1999, the library received its last major renovation: the sixth and seventh floors were remodeled, during which the stacks were reoriented and the fixtures and carpets were updated.