Associates Hold Boston Reception

In October, Cornelius J. Moynihan, Jr. (C'61), President of the Georgetown University Library Associates, and William D. Benjes (C'60), member of the Board of Trustees of the Associates, held a reception in Boston to welcome Susan Martin as the new university librarian of the Joseph Mark Lauinger Library at Georgetown.

Nearly 30 Associates and Georgetown friends and alumni gathered in the elegant Union Club on Park Street for an evening of conversation and conviviality. Introduced by Mr. Moynihan to the group, Dr. Martin, spoke about the intense and rapid growth of the Georgetown libraries in the decades since World War II, noting that in the late 1940s the total library budget was around $5,000, and as recently as 1960 the collection size was only just over 200,000 volumes (it is now more than 1.3 million volumes).

The growth of the library, together with the explosion of information as well as of information technologies, allows the university to take advantage of the strong collections and to build on these collections, as well as to implement a system which allows library users to access information in electronic form, residing anywhere in the country or even worldwide, she emphasized. This very successful event will be followed by similar events in other parts of the country, during the coming months.