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Opened in the fall of 1994, the five-storey Joseph S. Stauffer Library is the largest library on campus, with room for approximately 1.5 million volumes, six kilometres of bookstacks, and study and research space for more than 1,200 students.

It is located on the northwest corner of University Avenue and Union Street.

The library houses the university's humanities and social sciences collections and also contains state of the art computing and information services, seminar and training rooms, meeting rooms, maps, air photos, government documents, data collections, and the Union Gallery for art works by students.

Stauffer Library is designed in neo-gothic style to match the style of Douglas Library and is clad in limestone. The $48-million facility was a Queen's Challenge Campaign initiative funded by the Ontario government and the private sector. The names of all the donors are recorded as part of a display in the main lobby of Stauffer Library.

The library is named in honour of Joseph S. Stauffer, a graduate of Queen's (BSc 1920) and a generous benefactor. The largest donation toward the library came from his foundation, the Joseph S. Stauffer Foundation.

In 1997, Stauffer Library was awarded the Governor General's Award for Architecture. The library was designed by Kuwabara Payne Mckenna Blumberg.

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The "library of the 21st century” project

In the 1980s, Queen’s had a wonderful wealth of reading material and nowhere to put it. When it opened in 1926, Douglas Library had been designed to hold 575,000 volumes, but despite a 1960s expansion, Douglas was bulging with over four million books and journals.

Faced with this challenge of capacity and orientation, in 1988, Queen’s embarked on its “library of the 21st century” project. The new library would be conceived and delivered only after painstaking definition and competitive bidding. Principal David Smith turned to economics professor Alan Green, a dynamic advocate of campus planning and aesthetics, to champion the project.

With Professor Green in the lead, twenty working groups delved into every aspect of what an information age library might need, from ergonomic furniture design to electronic portals to personal safety. The new library would be both a place of knowledge acquisition and socialization, so a central location was imperative.

Local heritage activists quickly pointed out that the proposed library would necessitate the demolition of many distinctive homes in the vicinity of the Union Street at University Avenue intersection. Queen’s consequently agreed to relocate a cluster of heritage homes to new, off-campus locations near West Campus. Professor Green simultaneously spearheaded the crucial drive to find a lead financial sponsor for the project, one to join the generous support of the Ontario government. An AMS referendum garnered $515,000 from Queen’s students. But it was a donation from the Stauffer Foundation that pushed the new $42-million library from ambition to reality.

A 1920 science graduate from Queen’s, Joseph Stauffer had parlayed his engineering skills into a fortune by supplying telephone equipment and fuel cells in markets as diverse as Mexico and England. Like mining engineer James Douglas, who had financed Queen’s new library in the 1920s, Mr. Stauffer, and the foundation created after his 1978 death, never forgot his alma mater. With funding acquired, the library forged ahead. A design competition saw the Toronto firm of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB) selected as architects. KPMB conceived the library as a hybrid of neo-Gothic solidity and modern openness. The Globe and Mail called it “a stunning scheme.”

Sod was turned in 1991. Meticulous, hands-on project management saw the building delivered on time and on budget in the fall of 1994. In the months before the doors opened, millions of books were transported across the street from Douglas.

University Librarian Paul Wiens quickly employed the library’s 60 kilometres of electronic cable to bring Queen’s into the electronic information age. Students could enter the library through its doors on Union Street and access additional holdings online.

Stauffer Library is a vibrant campus hub, often with more than 1,000 people in the building at a time, that continues to evolve to meet the needs of the Queen’s community.

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