The John Hay Library will have extended hours starting today, thanks to a gift from Richard Gilbane.
For the rest of the semester - and possibly the rest of the year - the library will remain open an extra hour, until 6 p.m. on weekdays. The library, which has traditionally been closed on the weekends, will now also be open on Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
This semester will be a trial run for the extended hours to gauge student and community interest, according to Brent Lang, a Brown library communications and marketing specialist.
"To say we need this might be a stretch," Lang said. "But it's enhancing and improving library services and access to special collections."
Lang added that the extended hours may allow more people in the community who work during the week to visit the library on
Sundays.
The John Hay Library, which housed the University's entire library collection from 1910 until the Rockefeller Library opened in 1964, now features a variety of special collections, including the University archives, the world's largest repository of military and naval uniforms and over 60,000 comic books, graphic novels, comic art and related materials dating from the mid-1970s to the present. The library is named for John Hay 1858, a personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln and, later, secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
