Library History

The Early Years

A library first existed along the Bayboro Harbor when the United States Maritime Service Training Station’s ‘A’ Building opened in the early 1940s. The base library occupied a small conference room near the executive officers’ headquarters in the front of the building. Florida Presbyterian College used former dormitory space for its first library. When that institution (now Eckerd College) moved to its new campus, the Florida Institute for Continuing University Studies (FICUS) brought to the ‘A’ Building its “Extension Library” that served students enrolled in distance education classes throughout Florida. With the demise of FICUS in 1965, the Extension Library remained on site as a statewide institution. Meanwhile, USF created a small “browsing” collection for the initial wave of freshmen.

Regular library services came to the Bay Campus during the 1968-1969 academic year when the facility inherited about 200 surplus books from Tampa. That initial collection grew to approximately 2,400 volumes by the summer of 1969, and then more than tripled to nearly 8,500 over the next year. The library also purchased over 280 journals and magazines, including microfilm backfiles of many titles dating to 1960.

By 1971, the small but busy staff offered bibliographic instruction tutorials, regular reference service, course reserves for faculty, and interlibrary loan service. When the Extension Library moved to a new off-site location in 1972, the Bayboro Campus library grew by 4,200 square feet. Former shower facilities from the base became a reading room for the microfilm collection. In 1979 the overstuffed library boasted more than 52,000 volumes and nearly 600 periodical subscriptions.

Credit for this phenomenal expansion during the 1970s rests with the dedicated staff led by Doris Cook, a 1929 St. Petersburg High School graduate who returned to the area after earning her library science degree. After stints in public libraries, Cook served as the inspiration for the campus library during her tenure from 1968 through 1979. She was later joined by Mary “Betty” Ferris, Signe Oberhofer, and Jackie “Shew” Shewmaker, who herself would carry the title “acting director” nearly half-a-dozen times.

Longtime editor and publisher of the St. Petersburg Times, Nelson Poynter had lobbied local and state authorities for the creation and—later—expansion of a university campus in downtown St. Petersburg. He took pride in attending the June 1978 groundbreaking ceremonies for the Phase I expansion of the campus that would create a stand-alone library building and a new classroom building. Shortly after the ceremonies, Poynter suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away.

Within a month, the Board of Regents unanimously voted to name the new library in Poynter’s honor. It opened in May 1981 with nearly 70,000 volumes that had previously resided in ‘A’ Building. The structure also included a media center, allowing Bob Thrush—the audiovisual wizard who operated out of cramped quarters in the rear of ‘A’ Building—to move his operations into a new-and-improved setting. Bob and his student assistants had quite a chore, pushing televisions across campus, taping lectures and events, setting up lecterns and movie projectors, and often lugging equipment up the wobbly steps of ‘B’ Building, a wooden structure that lacked an elevator.

Samuel Fustukjian brought technology to the library during his tenure in the 1980s. He was aided by a talented corps of new librarians, including Helen Albertson, Kathleen Arsenault, Deborah Henry, Jacqueline “Jackie” Jackson, Tina Neville, and Gerald “Jerry” Notaro. As the book collection surpassed 100,000 titles, the video collection exploded. Automation in the form of an online library catalog replaced the card catalog in the mid-1980s.