Laupus Library celebrates 50 years of service
Laupus Library continued its celebration of its 50thanniversary with an open house on Oct. 25, bringing together ECU faculty and staff, former members of the Laupus staff and previous library directors to mark the milestone.
Past leaders of Laupus spoke about the library’s evolution and its broad range of offerings to the Health Sciences Campus.
Dr. Jo Ann Wooten served as the first director of the Health Affairs Library, established in 1969. Then located in the Old Cafeteria Building, it boasted 12 tons of donated books and one professional librarian. When Wooten retired in 1997, the library had moved three times and was located in the Brody School of Medicine. It had also been renamed twice and in 1993, under her direction, was named the William E. Laupus Library in honor of the former dean of the medical school.
Wooten said she’s glad to be a part of Laupus’ history and treasures the relationships she shared with her staff during her tenure—and that the anniversary celebration honored the library’s focus on its mission over the years.
Dr. Jo Ann Wooten gives remarks. Photo by Michelle Bone.
“We are celebrating what has been when the library’s original mission was to give the best information service we can respectively, efficiently, and with whatever means is available,” Wooten said, “and that hasn’t changed throughout all these years.”
She also said the library was early to adopt computer technology and that employees stayed updated on new technologies as they emerged so they could teach them to others.
“I always had people on the staff who were technologically savvy for that reason,” she said. “We couldn’t have ever envisioned at the time I was a director all the technology that was to come to the library today. But I love that there are still books here too.”
Dr. Dorothy A. Spencer also returned to Laupus for the anniversary celebration. Spencer was named director in 1997; under her leadership, the library added The Country Doctor Museum in Bailey to its history programs. She also concepted the design of a new library building and orchestrated the largest library move to date into a new health sciences building shared by the Colleges of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences.
“Even then, I was thinking about the next 10 years,” she explained. “I knew I could run the library that day, but I was asking myself ‘can I take it to the next 10-year stage?’”
According to Spencer, adding The Country Doctor Museum to the library’s collections in 2003 was a significant milestone in Laupus’ history.
“I can tell you a thousand reasons why it was crazy for us to ever undertake the gift of The Country Doctor Museum,” she said. “But without that gift, this library wouldn’t be the academic scholarly oasis it is.
“Many great universities have that depth of history, that sense of place, of mission that history tells,” she said. “We didn’t have that at Laupus. And here we were handed the opportunity to put it together almost spontaneously. It was the right thing to do.”
Spencer retired from the library in 2013 and lives in Loveland, Colo.; she said the anniversary celebration illustrated that Laupus is poised to continue its success.
“I will never cease to be grateful for the opportunities to practice my profession that ECU gave me,” she said. “I have worked with some absolutely superior academic leadership and I’ve seen how the presence of this library and ECU’s Division of Health Sciences has made a difference for Greenville, for the university and for the people of eastern North Carolina.”
Interim Directors Dr. Richard Eakin (2013-14) and Dr. Greg Hassler (2014-15) led the library during the search for a new director, and Beth Ketterman was appointed as interim director in 2015 and assigned the permanent role in 2017.
Ketterman said it is the honor of her professional career to lead Laupus into the next phase of its history.
“I’ve already seen the library evolve in ways that I couldn’t have predicted four years ago when I became interim,” she said. “Our librarians have taken on enhanced roles like co-authoring systematic reviews with health sciences faculty as a regular service, we’ve implemented a virtual reality studio and have a developer available to help create software in that environment, and we’re now a provider of professional writing consultations and data visualizations for DHS employees.”
Ketterman said it’s incredibly hard to predict exactly what the library will look like in the next four or five years.
“One thing I know that is certain is we will continue the tradition of being a leader in access to quality health research and information and the technology needed to use and promote that information. That was true in 1969, is true in 2019, and will be true in 2069.
“I think that is why it is so important that we celebrate the anniversary – we honor how far we’ve come and we can be inspired to continue in that tradition of excellence for the next fifty years.”
Learn more about the history of Laupus Library by visiting this timeline.
For more information about Laupus Library visit hsl.ecu.edu.
-by Kelly Dilda, University Communications