Carleton College Laurence McKinley Gould Library

19/09/2025

02/05/2025

Our long history of collaboration with Minnesota libraries!

22/10/2024

Midterm Break Monday !

We had a hot day for our Hot Cocoa & Cider Study Break, but everyone was happy for the sweet treat 😊

16/10/2024

What could be better than a hot cup of delicious cocoa or warm, spiced cider? Enjoying that delicious treat at the Libe, of course!

The Libe will be hosting a Hot Cocoa and Hot Cider giveaway on midterm break Monday to help fuel you during your studies.
Drinks will be available from 3–4 p.m. or until supplies run out.

Cocoa & Cider @ Gould Library
Monday, October 21st
3:00:4:00pm

09/10/2024

🎉 National Tutor Appreciation Week 🥳

THANK YOU! to all of the Academic Support Center Tutors! You are instrumental in helping make students succeed in their academic efforts at Carleton College. MANY, MANY THANKS for your time and commitment!

Find the Writing Center tutors and the ASC Director's office Write Here at Gould Library 4th Floor

07/10/2024

During National Tutor Appreciation Week we want to express a huge THANK YOU! to our amazing tutors in the Quantitative Resource Center. QRC tutors help students with math, statistics, and data in any class or comps project. This valuable resource is housed in Gould Library (4th floor) and is open to all interested students. Again, THANK YOU QRC Tutors!

05/09/2024

25/07/2024

: Bill Muir, botanist and environmental biologist (naturalist John Muir was a relative), joined the Carleton faculty in 1957. Diabetes caused him to go fully blind by 1968, but with dedicated help and support from his wife, Libby, he continued to teach until 1985, leading scores of expeditions to the ACM Field Station in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and making regular visits to the Muirs' northwoods cabin, hand-built by the Muir family, in pursuit of his ongoing love of the outdoors. Bill and Libby’s story, and the pair’s indomitable spirit, inspired many, and was written up numerous times, including a feature in People magazine and a segment on the television program PM Magazine. When it appeared likely that Bill would lose his sight, Libby took all of his classes herself, studied to earn a teaching degree, and began to assist in his lab work and other activities. In the wilderness and elsewhere, she acted as his eyes. Bill died 39 years ago this week, aged 57, due to further complications from the diabetes that came on in his childhood. This photo shows Bill and Libby Muir with Carleton students in the Arb.

18/04/2024

: This week we’re throwing back a full century to introduce you to one of the most colorful professors of Carleton’s past, the so-called “King of Foula.” Ian B. Stoughton Holbourn was a Scotsman who split his teaching time from 1920 until 1935 between Carleton and Oxford, and is considered the founder of our art department. Around 1900, he had purchased the remote, sparsely inhabited island of Foula, west of the Shetland archipelago, becoming laird of the island — or its “king,” as he sometimes styled himself (Foula remains in the Holbourn family still).

Holbourn’s life was also punctuated by not one but two maritime disasters. In 1914, the HMS Oceanic was wrecked on reefs near Foula’s southern tip, a tragedy that was hushed up at the time as potentially damaging to Britain’s wartime morale, but which Holbourn eventually wrote about. A year later, he was aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was fatally torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. Not only did he survive the Lusitania sinking, but he was instrumental in saving the life of a 12-year-old girl, Avis Dolphin, to whom he remained close for the rest of his life. In 1916, in response to Avis’s complaints that books for girls were boring, Holbourn wrote the bestselling novel, “The Child of the Moat: A Story for Girls, 1557 A.D.”

Holbourn’s title at Carleton was Professor of Aesthetics and Civic Art. “On the campus, his flapping blue cape and his free-flowing artist’s tie, his evangelical enthusiasm for all things Hellenic, and his quick disdain for all things American made their impression on provincial Carleton” (Carleton: The First Century, p. 207).