Bok's reservations about the library were ironed out successfully by the next week, and he approved the plans. The following week, the Corporation met and gave the plans their approval.

Bok said that no Corporation members had any objections to the library's final design. However, he refused to publicly release photographs of a model of the library, because, he said, he wasn't sure whether the Board of Overseers' approval was required before the model could be released. "I'd like to release the plans now, but I don't want a bunch of angry Overseers who wanted prior viewing of the plans on my hands," Bok said.

The next day, March 5, Bok conferred with Robert Shenton, Secretary to the Overseers and the Corporation, and found that he could legally release the design. However, he decided to "do the nice thing and show the plans to the Overseers before releasing them," and another week passed before the library plans were available to the University community.

THE PUSEY LIBRARY will rise only nine feet above ground level. It will be covered with grass, shrubs and walkways, and a grassy surrounding mound will shield it from view. It will look, if anything, more foliated than the dusty open space between Houghton and Lamont that it will replace.

The library's bottom two levels will be devoted to stack space for books now housed in Widener, Houghton, and Lamont--the University Archives, the Map Collection, the Theater Collection and about 1 million miscellaneous books. "What will be going into the Pusey Library already exists," Robert Walsh says. "There will be no new staff or new books--just more space. We've had to move several things out of Widener in the past for space reasons. Just in the last few years we've taken out the music, art, history of education, landscape architecture and current science collections and housed them with their respective departments."

Walsh says that the Pusey Library will be open only to those who need to use the special collections there. There will be a guard at the library's entrance who will ask people trying to enter what they want to use at the library before letting them in.

The library's top floor will, however, be devoted to study space. It will have carrels for 60 graduate students and 30 faculty, as well as open tables and a few seminar rooms. Stubbins has not yet finalized the library's interior design, but he says that it will have about 30,000 feet of floor space. It will be connected by underground passageways to the three libraries surrounding it.

LIBRARY OFFICIALS seem generally pleased with the library's appearance and book capacity. The surrounding mound outside is considered Stubbins's most ingenious innovation, though, because it will allow the upper floor to be as well lit as the inside of Lamont during the day but at the same time will give people inside the library a substantial degree of privacy and spare them from watching disjointed pairs of legs troop by all day. The mound's inner side will be concrete covered with ivy and small plants.

Everyone concerned with the library agrees that, amid all this sagacious planning and brilliant design, there will be one major problem: construction. The library's site is, unfortunately, on a bed of rock that will have to be blasted out before building can start. There will be a considerable amount of noise next year while construction crews dig the four-foot deep hole in which the library will rest.

Stubbins admits that "the hole in the Yard is going to be a pretty messy thing to put with for a couple of years. People will just have to walk around it. Access to Lamont will, of course, be maintained."

Construction will begin after this year's Commencement, probably around June 15, and end by Spring of 1975. Stubbins says that he thinks the hole will be filled in by the time the class of 1974 graduates.

Bok's concern with beautifying the Yard will not end with the Pusey Library design. He is already working with Buildings and Grounds officials on a new scheme to exclude all vehicles from the roadways in the Yard. Stubbins has already done a preliminary study--officially called the Yard Service System Study--that suggests that quiet electric carts be used for all the functions now performed in the Yard by motor vehicles.

Bok says that the electric cart plan is still in very rough outline, but that it will be "an efficient and certainly more pleasant way of performing the functions of cars and trucks."

"What I really want to do," says Bok, "is give the Yard the aura of a great grassy mall. That would be a really handsome sight."