You are invited to open the new Bass Library at Midnight on October 18th-19th!

It gives me the greatest pleasure to announce firm plans for the opening of the transformed library beneath the Cross Campus, and to let you all know that it has shed the name of Cross Campus Library and is now the Bass Library. The new name honors the generosity of Anne T. and Robert M. Bass '71, whose major gift helped fund the renovation.

Any and all members of the Yale community, students, faculty and staff, are warmly invited to join in the opening festivities at the Bass Library Pavilion (on Wall Street between Berkeley College North and Harkness Hall), which will include snacks and live music beginning at 11:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 18th. At 11:50 p.m. we will begin the countdown, to open on the stroke of Midnight. The Bass Library will be open for about an hour for everyone to view the interiors and sample food and drink offered by Dining Services and the Sustainable Food Project who will be operating the Library Café; At about 12:20 a.m. a procession of students, faculty, library staff, and special guests will be invited to gather in the Wright Reading Room (named for major donor William H. Wright II '82) and each take a book through from this beautiful new room in the basement of Sterling, to place on the shelves of the new Library.

The Library will close at 1:00 a.m. and will reopen to readers a few hours later that same morning (October 19) at 8:30 a.m. The Bass Library collection will be relocated over the next several evenings by professional movers working from midnight to 10 a.m.

Come join us as we celebrate this splendid new facility at the heart of the campus which, in the donors' words, "promises to be a model for academic libraries in the 21st century." It also promises to be fun! The Library will be officially dedicated later this fall in the presence of the Bass Family and other lead donors.

I look forward to seeing many of you tomorrow night.

Alice Prochaska
University Librarian

Contact: Geoffrey Little

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Page Last Updated: 11/24/2009