Background

Two Centuries of Library History at the University of Liège: From Its Origins to ULiège Library.

200 Years of the University Library

When it was founded in 1817, the University of Liège was established on the Isle al Hochet in the former Walloon Jesuit college. Little is known about the library’s facilities at the time the University was founded. The collections were housed in the college’s former library, which was furnished with new furniture for the occasion. Despite several rounds of renovations and remodeling, this building still stands, and the ALPHA Library continues to occupy it nearly two hundred years later. When the University of Liège was founded, the City of Liège donated the books from its public library—nearly 7,000 volumes—to the new university. This initial collection was quickly expanded to include the collection from Averbode Abbey (nearly 8,000 volumes) and 150 precious manuscripts from Saint-Trond Abbey.

Expansion of the Original Library in the 19th Century

Very shortly after the University moved into the former convent, plans were made for major construction work. Around 1820, Jean-Noël Chevron, who was in charge of the new university’s layout, drew up plans for new buildings. The library wing was expanded by adding four bays to the existing ones and an amphitheater intended for anatomy classes.

By 1835, due to the growing student population and expanding collections, further construction became necessary. This time, the renovation and construction of new buildings were entrusted to Julien-Étienne Rémont. He retained the bays added by Chevron to the Jesuit building and had the medical amphitheater demolished. Rémont completed the wing in the same style as the 18th-century structure and in a perfectly symmetrical manner. At that time, the ground floor of the building housed lecture halls for philosophy, law, and medicine, as well as the Botanical Museum in the central section of the Faculty of Medicine building.

These renovations made it possible to significantly increase the library’s floor space, which now occupied the entire first floor. Three large, ornately decorated rooms were created there, connected by arcades with Corinthian columns and topped by coffered vaults.

The axonometric section of the building and the plans published in the *Liber memorialis* of 1869 allow us to locate the library’s departments and provide an idea of the 1836 layout. They also show its expansions, between 1842 and 1869, into the building on Place Cockerill, which housed the music room and a hall with six columns. The chief librarian’s office and the reading room are located in the Paquay Barbière wing. At that time, the library’s collections were once again running out of space. A few years earlier, Fiess had had the former reading room above the amphitheater converted to house part of the collections (manuscripts, sheet music, engravings, and the medal collection), but these spaces were already full by the time Leroy wrote the *Liber memorialis* in 1869.

The situation appears to have remained unchanged until the early 20th century. In 1903, Adrien Wittert’s bequest of his collections to the University significantly expanded the library’s holdings. Some twenty thousand works—including manuscripts, incunabula, and numerous early printed books—enriched the collections, along with a collection of remarkable drawings and prints, works of art, and about fifty paintings. This unexpected bequest would soon prove problematic. As early as 1904, the cataloging of the books was halted due to a lack of space in the reading rooms.

Will we wait until it collapses?

In the early twentieth century, the library expanded to the ground floor of the building with the creation of a reading room for professors (now the Marie Delcourt Room) and the creation of the Wittert Room. The library continued to grow in these facilities until the early 1930s. In 1932, the overloading of the storage area on the first floor of the Place Cockerill building led to the evacuation of the collections and services housed there. Very soon, the central building, too, was on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the materials. A decision was then made to construct a new library, and work began with the demolition of the building on Place Cockerill. After several setbacks, the project was abandoned in the aftermath of World War II. In the aftermath of the war, an assessment of the situation was conducted. In those difficult times, the goal was to make the building operational as quickly as possible. A building renovation campaign was swiftly undertaken, and the new facilities were inaugurated in 1949.

Reopening After World War II

While the layout of the ground floor remained unchanged, this renovation marked the end of the large 19th-century halls. These were replaced by two levels of storage rooms equipped with steel shelving. A mezzanine reserved for offices and a stairwell were also constructed. Unfortunately, the planned storage space proved insufficient, and a significant portion of the collections remained in storage, awaiting better days, in military barracks located in the central courtyard. A second renovation project took place in 1969: a new reading room was installed in place of the first level of storage. This represented progress and provided a definite improvement in comfort. The ground-floor reading room, for its part, was converted into a periodicals room. It was also during this period that the Wittert Room was demolished to make way for the installation of one of the institution’s first computers. In the meantime, a solution was found for the collections stored in the barracks in the courtyard: the construction of a building that would temporarily serve as an annex to the University Library, pending the construction of a new large library on the Sart Tilman site.

General Library and Documentation Units

For a long time, the “General Library” was the University’s only true official library. However, beginning in the late 19th century, due to the dispersion of university institutes throughout the city and the growing specialization of fields of knowledge, certain departments and faculties began to develop their own libraries. The 1954 decision to relocate the entire University to Sart Tilman led, in 1956, to a radical overhaul of its library landscape, with the University opting to create specialized “Documentation Units” (U.D.), which were close to users and thus linked to the faculties or departments. As for the “General Library,” renamed in 1988 the “Library Information and Conservation Center” (C.I.C.B.), lost its role as a comprehensive university library and limited its acquisitions to general reference materials, as well as to the fields of history, literature, and philosophy, in order to meet the information needs of departments that had not yet relocated to Sart-Tilman.

A Network to Bring Them All Together

Faced with radical changes in access to information and user needs, driven by the rise of digital technology, ULiège decided in 2003 to modernize its libraries and reorganize them thoroughly so that they could more effectively fulfill their new missions. It reduced the number of documentation units or libraries from more than twenty to four major entities: the General Library of Philosophy and Letters (BGPhL, which became ALPHA in 2013 following the integration of the library of the new School of Architecture), the Léon Graulich Library of Law, Economics, Management, and Social Sciences, the Library of Science and Technology (BST), and the Library of Life Sciences (BSV). In addition to the necessary modernization and development of the digital library, this restructuring aimed to improve and expand services to users as well as to better coordinate acquisition policies.

Toward a University Library: ULiège Library

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