Elgan Davies
I came to work in the University Library, the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, straight from school as Library Assistant in the General Library at the Old College, which was the main university library at the time when all the arts departments were located in town. I stayed for two years before leaving to do my degree in Welsh and Welsh History and then a year’s Postgraduate Diploma course at the College of Librarianship Wales (now the Department of Information Studies) which was then an independent institution.
By the time I returned to the university as a member of staff the slow move ‘up the hill’ had quickened and the Hugh Owen Library had opened as the main university library. The oil crisis and ‘winter of discontent’ of the nineteen seventies put the brakes on things for a few years and I was asked to look after the General Library, or the Undergraduate Reading Room as it was then known, serving the remaining teaching departments still located in town who were waiting for the Arts Block Three building to be built, but it never was.
