ABOVE: A grand opening ceremony was held on Jan. 15, 2014, with 400 guests — including members of the Falwell family, several of Liberty’s pioneers and longtime supporters, area college presidents, and local and regional leaders. Nearly 10,000 students watched a livestream in the nearby Vines Center, and countless others tuned in online.
When the Jerry Falwell Library opened on Jan. 15, 2014, it became the first major facility to bear the name of Liberty University’s founder, the late Jerry Falwell Sr., and was the university’s largest investment in any on-campus structure at the time.
Liberty’s library was previously located on the first floor of DeMoss Hall with limited space and collections for a growing campus population. The 170,000-square-foot facility helped usher in a new era for the university, bringing innovation, technological advancements, and collaborative study spaces into one state-of-the-art building and kicking off a campus transformation.
The library features separate study zones for “collaborative,” “quiet,” or “deep quiet” work, complemented by 34 group study rooms with writable walls and display equipment. Students have access to over 100 computers throughout the building, with wireless internet, print/scan/copy stations, a book scanner, and battery kiosks as well as rooms with telepresence technologies for interactive virtual learning.
The library houses over 427,000 physical items — only a fraction of its collection of over 3.1 million educational and research resources available through the library’s website, where customers can search for books, journals, articles, videos, audiobooks, and more. A robotic book retrieval system stores the majority of the library’s physical resources and can deliver requested items to the Customer Service Center in as little as 10 minutes.
The institutional repository of faculty and student scholarly works, called Scholars Crossing, holds over 34,000 items that have seen close to 24 million downloads in the last 10 years. Additionally, the library offers a robust Interlibrary Loan (ILL) program.
A primary role of the library staff is to assist students in research, either in-person or through email, chat, phone, and virtual research support. The library offers research guides, hundreds of online tutorials, course-specific instructional sessions, and livestream research webinars. To learn more about the history of Liberty University and related entities, visitors can browse yearbooks, past editions of the school newspaper or magazine, and many fascinating documents related to the school and Falwell Sr.’s various ministries and projects in the Jerry Falwell Library Archives & Special Collections located on the terrace level.
Beyond the work and study spaces, students also gather in the multi-level Tinney Café, a food court with Pizza Hut Express, Auntie Anne’s, Einstein Bros. Bagels, and, new this fall, Shake Smart. The terrace level hosts campus events such as Research Week and live music performances.
Members of the Lynchburg community can also make use of the library. Staff offer a children’s story time over the summer.
With more than 80,000 square feet of interior and exterior glass, the building allows for an abundance of natural light and breathtaking views of campus and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By the Numbers
2.7 million electronic books and media items
427,000 print books and media items
247,000 unique journal titles
407 multidisciplinary and specialized databases
600,000 visits each year
2,400 seating capacity
