Most stories about the founding of the University skip over all of the immense effort needed not just to build the physical place, but to hire initial faculty and staff who would be responsible for getting all the pieces set up and ready to go for the first day of classes. I was hired in the summer of 1990 as part of a team to help the University Librarian ensure that the Library would be ready. I won't go into all the details, but highlighting a few will give you some sense of what was going on back then.
All photos are from the HKUST University Archives.
By the time I was hired, the University was established on three floors of the World Shipping Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui (now called the Wharf T & T Centre), and our deadline for starting classes was just under 1 year away. Most of my time was spent helping plan physical infrastructure, including all the furniture and especially the shelving which would need to hold all the books.
Speaking of books – our target was to open the Library on the first day with 100,000 volumes on the shelves ready to use. This required a lot of time and effort. At the peak, early Library staff were ordering, receiving, and processing up to 5,000 books per week. And they all had to be made ready and boxed up and stored in a warehouse in Kwun Tong – waiting for a building and shelving to be ready for them. As I recall, Don Wassink worked out the layout plan for storage, so that books with similar call numbers would be in the same box and grouped with others nearby, to make it easier to bring the boxes to the floor in front of the shelves for staff to be able to open them and have the correct shelves right in front of them. Huge time savings.
Meanwhile, during the year before move-in, faculty needed to develop their syllabi. And they needed to know what books would be on the shelves on day one. And students needed to be able to actually borrow those books on day one. So part of that processing in the World Shipping Center was to mark every book, catalog every book, and have their information available for searching in a Library Catalog by faculty and by incoming students. That catalog was housed in a DEC 5500 server which sat in Don's office on the 12th floor, accessible remotely via dial-up modem (the Internet was not yet robust, and certainly did not extend to the World Shipping Centre, and the World Wide Web was still several years away). So faculty could search the catalog and see which books had arrived, but they could not actually borrow any of them as they sat in the warehouse.
In the end, the Library building was made available (built and approved for occupancy), and the ordered shelves arrived and were installed, and the books were unboxed and placed on the shelves, and the Library opened. And that move of 100,000 books from the warehouse onto the shelves was done in less than two weeks.
It was an amazing feat, part of many amazing feats by staff throughout the building helping create Hong Kong's first research-focused university, and doing it in record time.
Edward Spodick
Associate University Librarian
lbspodic@ust.hk
p.s. If you like learning about some of this history, I will be writing several more of these Library Stories during the coming year. Each will target one or two areas of interest where I can help shed light on how things happened and why some things are set up as they are. Join me by subscribing to the Library Stories.
p.p.s. If you follow that link above to the first issue of the Library Newsletter in October 1990, you might notice my name in the directory at the bottom next to "Media / J.O.A.T.". Bonus points for anyone who can decipher that – consider it a challenge :-)
