UGA Dedicates New Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Library

If libraries were wine, the University of Georgia’s newest one would be a fine Chateau Lafite-Rothschild Premier Cru.

Something memoriable, valuable and delicious.

The $46 million Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Library is splendid, with enough space to house “the treasures of Georgia,” as officials said, and the right climate-controlled environment to preserve those treasures for coming generations to use and enjoy.

The new library sits in a prominent position on Hull Street, and seems capable of observing the rest of campus from its hilly spot. It doesn’t look as large as it is--110,000 square feet—because much of it is underground.

That’s where the climate-controlled vault is. UGA’s VP for Facilities, architect Danny Sniff, said the vault is one of very few in the world. If the power goes off, the Oconee River floods downtown, a heat wave hits or even a meteor strikes the Earth, fear not, the vault and all of its contents will be just fine.

There are three libraries contained in the elegant brick building: The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library containing rare books and manuscripts: the Richard B. Russell Library Gallery housing everything pertaining to politics, from drafts of legislation, to bumper stickers to papers, photographs and books; and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, stuffed with all sorts of film and video, including Peabody winners and home movies, and printed materials associated with these items.

It’s all so cool, it leaves you speechless. With state-of-the-art exhibit space, the library seems as much as a cultural arts museum as a storage facility. There are classrooms where teachers and students can handle 19th century documents and view footage from WSB’s coverage of the civil rights movement.

The university dedicated the building on Friday, under a sudden blue sky, while the members of the University of Georgia Foundation were in town. It was a special day, according to Hank Huckaby, chancellor of the University System of Georgia and a former UGA administration, who was one of the speakers.

“Both Dr. Adams and I are proud that we lived to see the day that Bill Potter would be happy,” Huckaby said. Potter, the head of the university libraries, began lobbying for the new facility in the early 1990s, and was beaming on Friday.

The crowd of celebrants included Governor Zell Miller, former speaker of the Georgia House Larry Walker, Congressman Don Johnson, alumni, business people, local elected officials and a pleasant-looking woman named Dorothy Reed Belcher Stephenson and her two sons, Calvin and Thomas.

Mrs. Stephenson was invited to the dedication by President Adams. She has given the university papers, books and the typewriter used by her grandfather, Thomas Walter Reed. This remarkable man finished college at UGA in 1888, when he was at 16. He went to work as a reporter for Henry Grady in Atlanta on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution.  Reed returned to UGA for law school and then worked as an editor at the Athens Banner Herald before becoming registrar of the university.

Reed wrote a 4,000-page, hand-written history of the university. To Mrs. Stephenson’s relief and delight, the original manuscript has been digitalized and is preserved in the Hargrett. 

There were many others in the crowd with similar happy stories. And many people who, after seeing the facility, are now contemplating making a gift themselves of passed-along family letters, photographs, deeds and documents moldering in dusty closets.