The Cubberley Education Library will reopen on Monday, November 3 to the delight of the Stanford community, visiting scholars, and Bay Area educators. Five years have gone by since plans were drawn up for the new library and four years since the staff and the most frequently used collections were relocated to Green Library, while other materials were stored for retrieval upon request. In the meantime, the historic Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) building, now the Angela Nomellini and Ken Olivier (ANKO) Building, was thoroughly renovated and expanded by the construction of a nearby four-story facility.
“Cubberley Education Library is one of many subject-focused libraries and centers dispersed around the campus,” said Ida M. Green University Librarian Michael A. Keller. “The tradition of locating branch libraries within the schools and departments of the faculty and students that they most directly benefit has served Stanford well and will continue to do so. This new library is a shining example in the constellation of Stanford University Libraries.”
Throughout the lengthy closure, the Cubberley Library staff continued to advise GSE faculty and students, prepared the collections for their new location by tagging most of them with RFID, and created finding aids for the college catalogs on the Archival Collections at Stanford website. They also catalogued thousands of new acquisitions and worked on the Green Library circulation and reference desks.
“Cubberley Library supports the research and teaching needs of those interested in education at all levels,” said Education Librarian Kathy Kerns. “Visiting scholars and local teachers for whom there are professional development programs at GSE are welcome to use the library’s extensive collections of science kits, college catalogs, textbooks, curriculum guides, and books of all types written for children and young adults.”
Patrons enter the new library through the GSE lobby, which retains much of its original style, although the large adjoining auditorium was demolished. The library’s main floor is visible from outdoors and filled with natural and reflective light, while providing a mezzanine view of a ground-level reading room and lovely sunken garden below. Inside, there are offices, meeting rooms, computer workspaces, long study tables, retrofitted shelving, and rooms with the historical curriculum and textbook collections.
Education was one of Stanford’s founding departments at its opening in 1891, when fewer than six percent of Americans attended high school. In 1898, Stanford President David Starr Jordan hired Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, then superintendent of the San Diego schools, to chair the embryonic department. By 1917, the department was well known nationally and became the Stanford School of Education, with Cubberley serving as its first dean until 1933.
Cubberley wrote and edited the popular Riverside Series in Education. Upon his retirement, he donated proceeds from the Riverside textbooks to Stanford for the construction of the original GSE building. Its library was named for him and the first Cubberley Lecture, one of Stanford’s oldest and most distinguished annual series, was delivered at the building’s dedication in 1938. “Cubberley had a special interest in the library going so far as to create his own version of the Dewey Decimal system which we still use today for the historical materials,” said Kerns. The Libraries’ Department of Special Collections houses his papers today.
Arthur Brown, Jr. designed the original GSE building. He and his partners are known for many architectural landmarks and civic buildings, such as the 1915 San Francisco City Hall, and many structures at Stanford, including Memorial Auditorium, Toyon Hall, and Burnham Pavilion. Brown had an inordinate influence on the design of Bay Area towers, both Hoover Tower and Coit Tower, and particularly on libraries, including the 1919 Main Library (now Cecil H. Green Library) at Stanford and the 1949 Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.