By Judith Cameron

Five years ago, the state cut the UMass Amherst Libraries’ acquisition budget from $5 million to $1 million, and 20 percent of the staff left with early retirement incentives. In the face of these tough challenges, the campus charted a new course for one of the most essential entities a research university provides.

The results of planning and creating a new kind of library have put the campus on the front lines of the digital revolution. User-friendly information resources, services, technology, and physical facelifts have transformed the 28-story W.E.B. Du Bois Library, the site of the most dramatic changes. In just a few years, the number of people using the library has increased by a whopping 80 percent. The other libraries in the campus system—the Integrated Sciences & Engineering Library, Image Collection Library, and Music Reserve Lab—also have been part of this remarkable rejuvenation.

Credit for this triumph over fiscal adversity goes to campus administrators, library staff, and a cadre of loyal library friends. As the national press wrote glowing reports about the library’s renaissance and other schools came to visit to learn about the changes, the number of library supporters was growing and gifts were increasing. Overall, more gifts were aimed at the libraries, from $25 Annual Fund donations to Class Gifts. Increased giving targeted Special Collections, study carrels, new furniture, and new endowments. Generous donations poured in from Massachusetts, where most UMass Amherst alumni live, and from as far away as British Columbia, Canada. Last year, more than 6,000 people made donations, for a record-setting total of $1,515,436. That’s an increase of $1.2 million, or 512 percent, from 2003, when state cutbacks were made.

Lorrey Bianchi ’69 and his wife, Kathleen Casey Bianchi, are among the library’s most ardent supporters. Last year, the couple arranged a planned gift to complement many years of annual giving. Now retired from accomplished careers in information technology, the Bianchis say they arranged the bequest, which has the potential to give the libraries a multi-million dollar gift, to help the campus’s library system take its place among top research libraries in the United States. “The library is the soul of the campus,” say the Bianchis, “enabling students and professors in every school and college to reach their full potential.” By creating the Lorrey and Kathleen Bianchi Library Special Collections Fund, the gift will endow support for the Special Collections and University Archives Department.

The endowment will ensure the libraries have funds to acquire and preserve written and visual records of UMass Amherst and the people of New England. It will also provide a source of funds for digitizing rare and at-risk materials to make them accessible to wide audiences. The campus collections already contain records documenting the rich history of social change in New England, including the movements for peace, social justice, racial equality, labor activism, agricultural reform, and gay rights. The personal papers of W.E.B. Du Bois are housed in the Du Bois library, which opened in 1973, and in 1994 was named after the pioneering sociologist, historian, novelist, and playwright.

The Bianchis’ gift will also endow the Bianchi Scholarship Fund for first-generation college students. Lorrey Bianchi, who spent his youth in many different places while his father was in the military, is the fi rst of his family to graduate from college. He graduated with a degree in European history and entered the workforce when information technology was a nascent field. He made his mark as a pioneer in data warehousing for financial services.

The Bianchis’ bequest is the single largest gift ever to be pledged to the libraries, with the potential to make an impact that willbe felt for generations. “I don’t expect to be remembered for the gift in a hundred years. But I hope that future generations will be appreciative that others before them cared enough to create and preserve valuable resources,” notes Kathleen Bianchi.

Others have rallied around the libraries because they are so central to education. As the former general counsel for the largest library in the world, John J. Kominski ’59, ’90 Hon., says, “The one thing that benefi ts everybody is the library.” He worked at the Library of Congress from 1960 to 1997.

Kominski typically earmarks his gifts for facilities such as study carrels. An annual contributor since 1988, he lends further support by serving on the Friends of the Library Board. He joined the Board in 1972, the last year Goodell Hall served as the main library for the campus. His gifts and leadership on the Board reflect his appreciation of his UMass Amherst education and the turnaround of the libraries. “I can see a return on my investment, and that return on investment is the increased use of the library,” he says.

The surge in library users—from 606,000 in 2005 to 1.2 million in 2007—follows a redesign of the most frequently visited spaces to better accommodate today’s students, who have been born into a culture of technology. The Learning Commons, which has doubled in size since it opened in 2005, is the hub that facilitates student achievement by blending technology, library services, and student services. “We want our students to spend quality time there, transforming information into learning, exploring ideas, and sharing insights with other students,” explains Provost Charlena Seymour.

The new formula for serving students has been coupled with forward-thinking ways of gathering, archiving, and disseminating scholarly research and other library materials. For example, the Integrated Sciences & Engineering Library is working with a research center focused on nanotechnology. Librarians are building an online information clearinghouse and digital nanotechnology library—a one-stop shop for researchers in academia, government, and industry—believed to be the fi rst online library dedicated to the emerging field of nanotechnology. Meanwhile, the Image Collection Library, a database of nearly one million images of paintings, sculpture, architecture, and other works of art, is now available for students on the Internet.

For Helen “Kay” Galloway ’61, who made her first donation to the library in 2007, library resources today, compared to when she was an undergraduate, are as different as night and day. “I remember being tasked with finding out about a German historian, Leopold von Ranke, and there was just one skinny book about him,” says Galloway. Today, UMass Amherst reference librarians have, at their fingertips, hundreds of databases to search for scholarly articles as well as books published on most any subject. A retired teacher and administrator for the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity, Galloway lives in New Hampshire, where she is a trustee of her town’s library. “An open and free library is key to a democracy,” she says. “We need a literate populace to make intelligent decisions about the future of our nation.”

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Among the diverse materials of the libraries, you can find:

• The papers of Massachusetts native, Civil War veteran, botanist, chemist, mineralogist, and educator Dr. William Smith Clark, who held the presidency of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now UMass Amherst) from 1867-1879. • The Beatrix A. McIntosh Cookery Collection—books, pamphlets, and ephemera relating to the history of cookery in New England—including more than 1,000 cookbooks prepared by community organizations, church groups, and others, from the 1880s to the present. • The records of The Massachusetts Review, an independent quarterly of literature, the arts, and public affairs cofounded by UMass Amherst professors Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan in 1959.

• Hundreds of buttons, badges, watchfobs, and other ephemera signifying the aspirations and values of the labor movement, collected over a lifetime by local historian John Bennett ’52. • The poetry library of major American poet Wallace Stevens. • Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, written by “the prince of entomologists,” Thomas Moffett, 1553-1604. • A map of an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842 and to Oregon and Northern California in the years 1843-1844 by John Fremont, the explorer known as “The Great Pathfinder,” who was also a Union Army general and the first major presidential candidate to run on an anti-slavery platform.

• Ten photographs of Japan taken between 1863 and 1871 by Felice Beato, a pioneer in war and documentary photography and an important chronicler of late-Edo and early-Meiji-era Japan. • The History of Capt. Thomas Parismas, Containing a Particular Account of the Cruel and Barbarous Treatment of a Young Lady. A work of popular fiction featuring infidelity, murder, cannibalism, and a happy ending, in its original wraps, published in 1812 by John Howe, a printer from the region now inundated by the Quabbin Reservoir.