What a difference a few years make! For many years, Blackwell Library at Salisbury University had the distinction of appearing regularly on the Princeton Review’s “This Is a Library?” list, featuring the worst college libraries. That was true as late as 2018. Just two years later, in 2020, for the first time, the SU Libraries earned an accolade as one of the Princeton Review’s “Best College Libraries,” and this year, we again won that honor, coming in at no. 23 in the nation.
As regular readers of Library Matters may recall, the SU Libraries have for a few years now bought textbooks for selected courses and put them on reserve to help students who couldn’t afford the high prices charged by many textbook publishers. We continue to try to help students with textbook costs, but we are now pursuing a different strategy.
It has become traditional for us to include a profile of a student worker in our newsletter. In this issue, we have decided to profile two student workers because we had so many nominations from our staff wanting their students featured. We’ll have more in the next issue, too. We are going to miss them when they graduate!
In recent years, libraries, once not considered controversial at all, have faced growing challenges to their book purchases. Indeed, in 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) recorded the highest number of challenges ever, with at least 1,597 individual book challenges or removals.
In the lobby of the Guerrieri Academic Commons, a new exhibit called Bygone Buildings takes center stage. As we look forward to Salisbury University’s 100th anniversary in 2025, it seemed like a good time to explore some campus buildings that are no longer standing.
Salisbury University is located on an amazing peninsula that has on its west side one of the United States’ great natural treasures, the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world.
Salisbury University’s Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture’s “Enduring Connections: Exploring Delmarva’s Black History” initiative is a massive undertaking to make Black history of the Eastern Shore more accessible.