Library Records

The St. Thomas library was established by Archbishop John Ireland, the founder of the school. While in Europe in 1886, the year after St. Thomas' opening, he purchased "many thousand valuable works" for the school.  However, with the founding of the Saint Paul Seminary in 1894, the majority of the books were transferred to the seminary library.  The remaining 500 books were kept in a frequently locked and poorly lighted room in the old Administration Building.

The situation improved significantly in 1912 when a library was established in well-lighted and well-furnished quarters in the newly constructed Ireland Hall.  The Rev. William Etzel, the college's first appointed library director, began building and organizing the collections.  The library moved again in 1931 into to more spacious quarters in the western end of Aquinas Hall, where it would remain for 27 years.

The school’s first free standing library, the O'Shaughnessy Library opened in 1959. The building was constructed with funds provided by I.A. O'Shaughnessy (Class of 1906).  By the 1980s, the university had again outgrown its library space.  The fall 1991 opening of the Frey Memorial Library and the creation of the O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center provided room for 450,000 volumes.  It also created new study and research areas for members of the university community; the library center now seats more than 1,600 readers, more than the twice the previous number.  The Frey Memorial Library was named after Mary and Eugene Frey (Class of 1952). A branch library was opened on the Minneapolis campus in 1988, moving to Terrence Murphy Hall in 1992.  It moved to its current home in Opus Hall in 1999, when it was renamed the Charles J. Keffer Library.