Partner Spotlight - Utah Valley University’s Ira A. and Mary Lou Fulton Library

by Elise Aiello on Jan 27, 2023

This month, our Partner Spotlight will focus on the Utah Valley University Fulton Library in Orem, Utah. We spoke with Lauren Tolman, Communication Specialist-Library Marketing, to tell us more about the Fulton Library.

Tell us a little bit about the Fulton Library at UVU

Utah Valley University’s Ira A. and Mary Lou Fulton Library serves a college community of 43,000 students in Orem, Utah. The Fulton Library provides user-centered services, various learning spaces, and essential resources that support the university's mission of educating students for success in work and life. In 2021, we welcomed over 500,000 visitors, demonstrating our importance in the lives of our campus community of students, faculty, and staff.

Fulton Library features five floors of spaces and resources for all; we provide free private study rooms, books and research materials, equipment checkout (including laptops and hotspots), and a café. The George Sutherland Archives collects and makes available materials that document and reflect the history and development of Utah Valley University and the surrounding communities, with a special focus on student and professional theses, local secular history and Deaf history and culture.

Tell us something unique/interesting about your library

Unique to our library is a stained-glass gallery called Roots of Knowledge. Roots of Knowledge is a sweeping stained-glass exhibit of human history and evolution. The gallery is 154 feet in length, and is comprised of 40,000 pieces of glass in 80 windowpanes. The intricate details incorporated into every window represent years of painstaking research on the events and people that shaped humankind from the days of wooly mammoths and cavemen to the iPhone.

How does being a part of the open source community help the UVU Fulton Library?

UVU’s Fulton Library joined ByWater’s open-source community and transitioned to Koha in 2019. After a smooth migration, Koha has helped Fulton Library serve the university community in myriad ways over the last few years. Patrons are easily able to search for, save, and manage their items, and staff is able to work more efficiently with a smoother workflow. Koha’s advanced search parameters- including type, publication date range, and format- have been particularly helpful when assisting students locate appropriate items."

Fulton Library Annual Report and Strategic Plan 2021-2022

You can view the Ira A. and Mary Lou Fulton Library's 2021-2022 Annual Report and Strategic Plan here.