PRESS RELEASE
December 6, 2002
UM Performing Arts Library Named for
Michelle Smith at Gala Celebration
The Performing Arts Library (PAL) at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center was officially dedicated and named for Michelle Smith, daughter of Robert H. and Clarice Smith, well known area philanthropists and generous supporters of the University of Maryland, on Tuesday, November 26, in a special event for invited guests.
Earlier this year Robert H. Smith established an endowment fund for the library in honor of his daughter, the largest financial gift in the history of the UM Libraries. The fund is earmarked to provide perpetual support for the programs, services, equipment, and materials that the Library offers in the fields of theatre, dance, and music.
Michelle Smith, a dedicated arts enthusiast and generous supporter of the arts in the region, is a founding member of the Center’s new Leadership Council. In addition to the Performing Arts Library, she is honored at the University of Maryland by the Michelle Smith Professorship of Logistics at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Ms. Smith is also involved with the Levine School of Music and actively supports various non-profit organizations around town. She oversees many of the Smith family’s charitable activities as director of the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation. An avid art collector, Michelle Smith is the mother of two children.
The dedication event began with a cocktail reception, followed by a seated dinner. Serving as host for the evening, University President C. D. (Dan) Mote, Jr., welcomed the guests and made the official gift announcement, thanking Michelle Smith and the Smith family for their generosity.
In his remarks, Dr. Mote pointed out that the Clarice Smith Center Performing Arts Center is incomparable and unparalleled in this country. He added: “It is the only university performing arts center that unites the educational departments of music, theater, and dance with their performance venues and their library in one facility. And the Library that this Center boasts is a particularly rich and distinctive resource for study and performance.”
Expressing his gratitude to the Smith family, and in particular to Michelle Smith, Dr. Mote said: “Attracting students and sending them out into performing arts careers is what we are all about. There’s a great synergy in having this Library as part of intellectual and performance environment of student life here in the Center.”
At the conclusion of Dr. Mote’s remarks, the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library signage in the Circulation area was unveiled by Ms. Smith and Dean of Libraries Charles Lowry. During the dinner, held in the Ina and Jack Kay Theatre, Dr, Mote presented Michelle Smith with an attractive gift commemorating the special evening--a print of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library mounted on a exquisite keepsake box that also contained a personal plaque inscribed with Ms. Smith’s name and a reference to the dedication of the library.
Other speakers, introduced by Dr. Mote, included Dean Lowry and Bruce Wilson, Head of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. Thanking Michelle Smith for her “extraordinary generosity,” Dean Lowry pointed out that the magnitude of the gift surpasses any other the Libraries have been given over the years.
He added: “This library has reinvented itself. Formerly a Music Library, it now serves theatre and dance as well and with the opening of this new facility and now its naming as the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, we have literally entered a new era. As a fully functioning branch of the University Libraries, we are also an integral part of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.”
Dean Lowry continued: “This gift symbolizes a collaborative future. As part of the Performing Arts Center, it will help us find new opportunities to serve the performing arts community, help us build collections in ways that were not possible before, and help us find partners to develop digital access to our holdings appropriate to the new information age.”
Library Head Bruce Wilson explained that he was mindful not only of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library as a place where people live and work, but also of the “extraordinary generosity that has helped build it and create the environment that nourishes the people who live and work in it.” Wilson stated further: “Libraries this good don’t get that way without the help of people like the Smiths.
“It is not just I speaking now, “ Wilson added in addressing the Smith family, “it is, indeed, a chorus of grateful faculty, students and staff who live and work in this library who say thank you.”
The program also included remarks by Kristian Twombly, a graduate student at the School of Music who spoke movingly of what the new Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library means to him in terms of its collections, technology, and favorable new location.
Among the invited guests on hand for the celebration were: former U.S. Senator Joseph Tydings (D-MD), Maryland Delegate Tawanna Gaines, and Frank Angier and Barbara Hornbake Angier (chair of Hornbake Library Advisory Committee and daughter of R. Lee Hornbake for whom the Hornbake Library is named). Also present were the following major donors to the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center: Robert H. and Clarice Smith, Robert and Arlene Kogod, Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn, and Jack Kay.
Entertainment was provided by Linda Mabbs, Chris Vadala, Delores Ziegler, and John Greer, faculty members at the School of Music.,
The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library is the central location on campus for circulating, reference, serial, and special collections in dance, music, and theatre. Located at the heart of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, it gives the Center distinction among United States university performing arts centers as the only one to offer such splendid facilities for education and performance in dance, music, and theatre, complete with a state-of-the-art library. The Michelle Smith Library’s location, collections, technology, and status as a branch of the University of Maryland Libraries make it one of this country’s premiere performing arts libraries for the twenty-first century.
Among the Michelle Smith Library’s public spaces are a lofty main reading room, ample study and seating locations including 58 multi-media carrels, an inspiring periodicals alcove, a comfortable lounge, and a group study room equipped for remote control video viewing. The seminar room on the second level, nearby the stacks of circulating books and the library courtyard, provides space and media presentation equipment for instruction and meetings.
The Library’s distinctive Irving and Margery Morgan Lowens Room for Special Collections is a quiet place for studying archival and manuscript materials of the Special Collections in Performing Arts. The exhibition gallery and adjacent lecture/conference room of the International Piano Archives at Maryland link the Library to the Grand Pavilion of the Performing Arts Center and its exciting public programming.
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