Pacific University Legacy Book Collection

Pacific University began collecting books for its Library beginning with its founding in 1849. The books were originally kept in Old College Hall, and then were moved to shelves on the third floor of Marsh Hall circa 1895. In 1912, they were moved to the university's first standalone library building, Carnegie Library. They were moved again circa 1965 when Scott Library opened, and once more circa 2005 when Tran Library opened. Probably during the Scott Library era, older and rarer books from Pacific's collections were segregated out into a locked storage area, and the catalog cards for those books were separated from the main catalog.

Around the 1990s, when the library's old card catalog was converted to digital MARC format records, the rare book catalog cards were apparently left out of the conversion process and were subsequently lost. This left the bulk of Pacific University's historic books to be unrepresented in its online library catalog. While some books were later re-processed and added back to the online catalog, thousands of other books were left in a backlog, with no meaningful points of access or discoverability.

This collection provides basic bibliographic descriptions of this legacy collection of historic books, allowing them to be discovered and used.