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| Elisabeth Tully, director of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, and Tim Sprattler, reference librarian, look on as Head of School Barbara Landis Chase (right) cuts a ribbon during reunion weekend to reopen the front entrance of the library. |
When the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library was renovated in 1988 and an addition was built facing Flagstaff Court, it seemed an entrance to the library on the new side of the facility made a lot of sense. Scores of students walked the paved paths in front of Foxcroft and Bartlet halls to and from GW, classes or Commons, and classrooms surrounded Flagstaff Court. So the front doors behind the stately stone columns facing the Great Lawn were closed and locked. Fifteen years later, they are once again open.
Elisabeth Tully, the library’s director, says the library staff, and in particular reference librarian Tim Sprattler, were behind the effort to unlock the front doors. “We want to make it more convenient for people to go in and out, no matter what side of the building they might be on,” she notes. And if one set of doors is good, how much better are two? Now, Tully says, when a patron leaves the library and opens the “front” doors that lead to the Great Lawn, the Armillary sphere, a great expanse of blue sky and the Elm Walk, there is a sense that this is what the library architects and builders intended. |
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