USC Gets U.S. Funds to Reinforce Library
USC will receive more than $7.5 million in federal funding to retrofit a 68-year-old campus library, Vice President Al Gore announced Thursday.
The grant, provided by a Federal Emergency Management Agency program, will provide money to seismically retrofit the university’s historic Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library.
USC has planned to structurally retrofit the 168,000-square-foot library, one of the oldest buildings at the university, to bring it up to current building codes. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, funds for such projects were made available under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.
Hundreds of employees have been relocated to other parts of the campus and 800,000 of Doheny’s roughly 1.2 million volumes have been put in off-campus storage, said Jerry Campbell, USC dean of university libraries.
“It’s a grand old library--it’s certainly worth saving,” Campbell said. Construction will begin later this month and should be completed by April 2001, he said.
The cost of the project totals about $10.1 million. Campbell said some of those funds will be used for aesthetic improvements.
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