Strength to Strength Campaign Report

All the Friends of the Library

In our easily-distracted, fast-paced digital world, university libraries need a few good friends.

Entering a new decade, Trinity’s John W. Graham Library could hardly have better companions than Hilary Nicholls ’59, and the long-running group Friends of the Library.

Nicholls, a former University of Toronto librarian, pledged a $1-million donation to help endow the librarianship at Trinity. The Friends of the Library then pledged to match her donation – this on top of the $1.1 million they had previously given for the building itself, plus another $1-million endowment for acquisitions. “Over the years, Hilary’s and the Friends’ commitment – moral and financial – has taken us from a struggling, minimalist library, to one where development and innovation are possible,” says Nicholls Librarian Linda Corman.

And since the group’s inception in the 1970s, the Friends have consistently supported library projects of all kinds, including the hiring of a part-time cataloguer and the preservation of rare books. “The collections they have enabled make the library more interesting and add a lot of research strengths,” Corman says.

The librarianship endowment helps to meet an emerging need: Librarians spend a lot of time helping people find information, and many U of T programs now have a requisite “information literacy” component. To this end, the library must provide individual and group instruction, both face-to-face and online.

“These are the kinds of activities the library is increasingly committed to, but all of this takes a lot of expertise and staff time,” says Corman. “This endowment helps tremendously in maintaining the strength we need in our human resources.”