Renovation projects impacting services at multiple library locations. More information.
“Meet you at the library bridge!”
It was a refrain heard all over campus. Before cell phones, before location tracking – in an era of longer waits, daydreams, and landlines – University of Kentucky students would begin their journeys to class, home, or downtown from the bridge that once connected King Library North and King Library South.
Today those libraries are known as the Little Fine Arts & Design Library and the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). But before they were renamed and specialized, and before the bridge came down, the Margaret I. King Library functioned as the true core of campus.
“That bridge was a campus landmark,” said Shawn Livingston, Director of Research Services and Director of Space Planning. “The same was true of the library deli in the basement. The food wasn’t always great, but it was a gathering place for campus. For many former students, King Library holds some of their most vivid memories.”
From its beginnings as the campus’s historic heart, King Library’s role has grown even more central to the state it serves. As the site of the SCRC, King Library is the permanent home of the rare and unique primary source materials that document the history and culture of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
In May 2026, UK Libraries began a two-year renovation of King Library that will bridge its current and its former roles. The changes will allow the library to better serve future generations of Kentuckians both as the gateway to and steward of the state’s collective past and as a much-improved gathering place for UK students.
“That is always the function of a library: as a meeting place, a place to go to know that you're not alone in the world,” said Livingston. “These renovations will create a more accessible building. It will be easier to get around, and connect users not only to our collections but to each other. In that sense, the renovations are restoring these spaces to their original function and returning King Library to its past.”
From her office on the First Floor of the SCRC, Associate Dean for Research & Discovery Deirdre Scaggs encounters many alumni revisiting a building which stands as a landmark in their student experience.
“One of the best parts of my job is seeing alumni, now parents, returning to King Library with their children,” said Scaggs. “They are so excited to share their memories of this building, which was so central to their time at UK.”
One day a mother came into the library with her son and asked, “Where was it that we used to walk around and check out books?” Though the core stacks are now closed to the public, Scaggs led them up the stairs and on a tour through the tightly-packed shelves. “The joy on her face – and the embarrassment on her son’s – was an amazing combination,” Scaggs recalled.
King Library has meant many things to many students, teachers, and scholars over its nearly 100-year history, and served many different – and still-evolving – roles for the campus.
For the first half century of UK’s history, the campus lacked a formal library system. Departments and professors owned small collections of books from which students could borrow. In 1909, University President James K. Patterson asked Margaret Isadora King to develop a library that would serve the entire university. With that request, King became UK’s first librarian, and UK Libraries was born.
That year, she and two student assistants moved into the recently-completed Carnegie Library, UK’s first dedicated library building. King would expand the Libraries’ collections from a single room to more than 400,000 volumes by the time she retired in 1947.
Through King’s work, the Carnegie Library was quickly outgrown, so construction began on a new University Library, which opened in 1931. The building was renamed in King’s honor in 1948.
“It was built in the heart of campus, and meant to function as such,” said Scaggs. “The whole campus revolved around the library.”
The library was expanded in 1962 with the addition of what is currently known as the King Library Annex. When first constructed, users could pass freely between the two buildings – a capacity that will be restored by the renovations. King Library North, now the Little Fine Arts Library, was built in 1974 to house Special Collections.
The opening of William T. Young Library in 1998 established the university’s third main library, shifting the center of gravity on campus and allowing the King buildings to take on their current contours, though these too are shifting.
“After the renovations, King Library will have a totally different feeling than it has for the last 25 years – one that’s much closer to its original purpose,” said Scaggs. “Archives can sometimes have a feeling of austerity that creates an unintentional barrier around them, but with improvements in accessibility and the addition of classroom space on the main floor, more and more students will come into King Library feeling like it’s a space for them.”
“As those students become parents and bring their own children back to visit, they’ll be able to say, ‘That’s where I had my first economics class,’ or ‘That’s where I met your dad!’ King will continue to be a landmark of the student experience, and we’ll be treated to a whole new generation that has created lasting memories here.”
To prepare for the renovations, everything – yes, everything – in King Library had to be moved. In a process that took over a year, librarians, archivists, and staff members boxed, crated, and occasionally craned materials from shelves, stacks, storage rooms, and walls. High-tech equipment in The Stacks; books and periodicals in the King Library Annex; a full floor of map cabinets; manuscripts, rare books, and archives across eight floors of core stacks; printing presses from the King Library Press; recently-acquired materials in intake rooms and processing rooms – it all had to go.
Many older materials required rehousing in order to be stable enough to be moved. And space had to be found in the Little Fine Arts & Design Library to make room for the 5,000 cubic feet of materials that were too valuable, fragile, or frequently used to be moved off-site, including photographs, AV materials, rare books, and certain oversized items.
Anything that couldn’t be rehoused on campus – tens of thousands of cubic feet of materials – were trucked 100 boxes at a time along a special route to Kentucky Underground Storage in Wilmore, south of Lexington, where they will spend the next two years 130 feet underground in the stable temperatures and humidity levels of a former limestone quarry – “essentially a large cave,” said Director of Manuscript Collections Megan Mummey.
Touching every item in the library’s collections allowed librarians to rectify past errors and plan for ways to fix problems in the future. It also led to some unexpected discoveries.
“Before linked data, before databases, if you gave a collection a number, someone else could come along and give a different collection the same number,” said Mummey. Her team discovered a collection of political papers from the mid-20th century bearing the same number as the personal papers from a 19th-century judge from Nicholasville. “We uncovered the paperwork for both, peeled them apart, and now have the chance to turn this into an opportunity for student interns to process these collections in the future.”
More strange was a stray bag of Estonian husbandry records. “We don’t know where they came from,” said Mummey, “but somebody was clearly interested in cows in Estonia.”
Other stray items persisted unseen and untouched for decades. “We came across a box with a notecard in it, that these particular items had been left in Locker #2 in 1985. They were books about postmarks in the mid-19th century. We looked up the researcher who had left them behind 40 years ago but discovered that he had passed away.”
For the most part, however, multiple generations of UK librarians and archivists, using constantly changing means and methods of collections management, have successfully kept an astounding amount of material neatly organized and easily accessible to students, teachers, and researchers from around the world.
“We found a handful of missing things, but we didn’t come across too many collections we didn’t know about,” laughed Mummey.
Although King Library will be closed for the next two years, UK Libraries users can continue to access materials, services, and other resources throughout the duration of the renovation, though service speeds may slow slightly and service locations will necessarily change.
Visit our Renovations Impacts page to find details about particular services and collections.
When the doors of King open once again in 2028–29, users can expect a more open and accessible building, and a return to the services that have been housed there for the last 25 years.
“There will be a lot more student interaction, with students spread throughout the building,” said Livingston. “It will be easier to get around. There will be a dedicated, library-centered teaching space. And we’ll open up the old reading rooms where the WPA murals are, returning many parts of the building to their original functions.”
“In the future, users can expect improved wayfinding and better amenities, but still count on that same experience of walking into the Breckinridge Research Room and seeing that beautiful ceiling and the wood bookshelves,” said Mummey. “That cozy, old-school academic environment will be retained, and nothing will change about our services once we’re back in the renovated building.”
One element of the building that won’t change during the renovations are the central stacks with their trademark industrial green hue. “The stacks are structural,” explained Livingston, “they’re a permanent part of the building. No engineer has figured out a cost-effective way to remove or replace them.”
“At the end of the day, we’re here to help users find what they’re looking for – whether it’s books, archival materials, oral histories, or other resources,” he added. “These renovations are focused on that core mission, making it easier to find help here.”
