Thanks to a generous donation from the Edward W. and Betty Knight Scripps Foundation, University students and the public soon will be able to easily access the country's premiere collection of information on the American Presidency.
On behalf of the Scripps Foundation, which supports education, the arts and humanitarian relief efforts, Betty Scripps Harvey and her husband Jeremy G. Harvey have offered a $1.6 million challenge grant to the University's Miller Center of Public Affairs for its renovation and expansion project.
The donation will be used to create the Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive, which will house the Miller Center's collection of materials on the presidency and American government.
"The library will make existing resources more available to scholars at the University and the public," said Miller Center Executive Director Wistar Morris.
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Among the Center's unique resources are oral histories of former presidents, significant publications on American presidents and government and secret presidential tapes and transcripts from the Roosevelt through the Nixon administrations, Morris said.
About 250 people, including University President John T. Casteen III, attended a groundbreaking ceremony on Friday for the Thompson Wing of the Miller Center, which will be the site of the new library and archive.
"The Center has not had a fixed library of any sort, although we have lots of books," said Miller Center Resident Scholar Kenneth W. Thompson, for whom the new East Wing is named. "It will certainly be a great benefit to everyone."
Thompson served as director of the Center from 1978-1998.
It is an honor, said Thompson of the naming of the wing, but hundreds of people have been involved in making the project possible.
The Thompson Wing also will add more conference space and offices to the Center's facilities.
In addition to the new library, the Miller Center project, which is expected to cost $7 million, includes extensive renovation and landscaping of the Faulkner House mansion where the Center is located.
The grant is a challenge grant, meaning the Scripps Foundation donation will pay the $1.6 million only after the Center has raised a total of $5.4 million.
It has raised $3.3 million from several hundred donors so far, Morris said.
"The goal is that the library should be finished by 2001," Thompson said.
All of the construction on the Center should be completed by July 2002, Morris said.
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