UD breaks ground on new bookstore

University officials and Governor Jack Markell welcomed Barnes & Noble College Booksellers President Max Roberts to break ground Monday at the site of the new university bookstore.

University Executive Vice President and Treasurer Scott Douglass said he had hoped the building, located on the corner of Main Street and Academy Street, would be finished before the next school year starts. However, Barnes & Noble will not be moving its textbook operation into the new site until October 2011.

 Next fall, textbooks will be sold in the current bookstore in the Perkins Student Center, Douglass said.

"They didn't want to change buildings and processes that close to the process," he said.

President Patrick Harker said Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and the university have enjoyed a partnership since 2002.

"I'm happy to announce we've just signed a 15-year contract extension to continue our collaboration," Harker said.

The ceremony was billed as a "ground opening," rather than a ground breaking, for several reasons, he said.

"Locating this building on Main Street really opens us up to the town," Harker said. "Newark is so important to UD, and UD to Newark, and this will be such a lively intersection of the city and the university."

Douglas echoed the significance the new Barnes & Noble location will carry for the downtown Newark and university communities.

"If you look at Main Street, it's come a long way in the past 10 years," he said. "But it needed to take that next step, and a real, full-service bookstore—not just a textbook operation—but a commercial bookstore would be a real opportunity and a really vibrant thing for Newark."

The university bookstore's relocation should create new jobs, doubling the store's normal number of employees from 25 to 50 and reaching up to 100 employees during times of peak student traffic, Harker says.

To accommodate potentially exacerbated vehicular traffic on Main Street, Douglass said there will be a parking lot behind the store along Delaware Avenue.

 "Newark has its own challenges with traffic, but this bookstore won't really profoundly add to them," he said. "We're doing things to mitigate that problem."

Harker said the bookstore opens up not only retail possibilities, but also educational opportunities as well.

"The opening up of a bookstore also opens up the life of the mind," Harker said, referencing the ceremony's title. "It opens us up to intellectual debate, to the exchange of ideas and opinions, and to things that matter."

Roberts also touched on the bookstore's future role as an intellectual hub for the university and Newark communities.

"What we're going to build here is a modern-day village green, a place that will welcome UD and Newark communities, a knowledge center where people of all ages will come to feed their intellectual curiosity, connect with peers or maybe just find a comfortable place to study," he said.

Roberts stressed Barnes & Noble's commitment to university students, mentioning the recent addition of digital textbook sales to the company's website.

 "[Students] have the choice of getting new books, getting old books or getting digital books—whichever works best for their budgets," he said.

Douglas Tallamy, professor of entomology and wildlife ecology, served as faculty representative at the ceremony and spoke about the bookstore as a potential venue for a comprehensive collection of faculty-authored works—something the university presently lacks.

"Most UD authors don't know each other. Even worse, unless we assign our books as textbooks, most of the students don't know which of their professors have written books," Tallamy said. "There are opportunities to share achievements within the UD community and opportunities to set examples of endeavor and excellence for our students."