The precise origin of the Business Library is lost to the annals of time. The first known mention of the library occurred in the 1914 Bulletin of the College of Commerce which refers to the "Special Library of the College of Commerce and Business Administration". This library was located in the office of Prof. Edwin Judd, who was an Associate Professor of Foreign Trade at the time. A gift of $500.00 was made to the library in 1915 by Theodore N. Vail (the first president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co). This gift made it possible for the College to purchase a small core collection of books, which were housed for a number of years in the basement of Gibson Hall. Vail himself was a pioneer in extending the technology and vision of long distance communication- he might be pleased to know that his gift enabled the high-technology library of today.
By 1916 the College had become one of 14 charter members of the newly formed American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business- one of the Library’s many moves as an early adopter. Accreditation standards have always required that students have access to sufficient high-quality resources, providing the impetus for growing the library from a collection of shared books into a separate, professional library. In one source, Prof. Robert Elsasser is credited with setting up a more formal library, and the first librarian mentioned was Felica Jung.
In 1942, a bequest of $300,000 by the widow of Norman Mayer, a prominent New Orleans businessman, was made with the intent to establish buildings for both the College of Commerce and its library. The Norman Mayer building was dedicated in 1942, and expanded with a 3-story annex in 1949 to accommodate what was then called the Norman Mayer Library. The Librarian from 1944 through 1968 was Mrs. Oran Logan Marcoux, who had seen the library grow from a small collection in Gibson Hall to a sizable collection of approximately 20,000 volumes. The Library proved itself an early adopter again by transitioning from the archaic Dewey Decimal System to the Library of Congress Classification (LoC), drastically improving findability as the library continued to grow- a massive undertaking, pre-digitally.
In 1969 Elizabeth Casellas joined the faculty as Director of the Library, with the academic rank of Associate Professor. She had completed both a M.A. in education and a M.S. in librarianship from Columbia University in New York, and was the first library director with a professional library degree. The next several years marked several positive changes in the library, under the leadership of Dean Peter Firmin.
By 1971 the library was bursting at the seams. To continue to expand, it consolidated several collections, and moved into the adjacent, newly renovated Tilton Hall, recently vacated by the Law Library. Tilton Hall, the site of the first Tulane University Library, allowed the Library to welcome both more volumes and more students. The budget of the Norman Mayer Library also nearly quadrupled in the space of four years, from $20,000 in 1968/69 to $75,000 by 1972/73. The staff of the library likewise grew, and with it, modern amenities of a library like an open stack arrangement was implemented, and service points, like reference and circulation desks, were established.
In 1978 Mrs. Casellas retired and was succeeded in 1979 Dorothy Whittemore, who became the new director of the Norman Mayer Library, overseeing the library as it moved to its new domicile.
The Norman Mayer Library operated in Tilton Hall until the construction of Goldring/Woldenberg Hall in 1985. The Library occupied the entire 3rd floor of the new building, and was named after Tulane alumni Lillian and Robert Turchin, long-time supporters and advocates for the school and library (incidentally, making Turchin possibly the only campus library to share a name with a baseball stadium).
Ms. Whittemore retired in 1992, followed by Donna Bishop. Ms Bishop began a multi-year project to integrate the library's holdings into Tulane's online catalog. This project disintegrated much of the friction between library holdings and patrons- another great stride in Turchin’s longstanding history of embracing novel methods of information access.
In 1995, William Strickland was named as Business Librarian, transferring from Howard-Tilton. During the first few years of his tenure, Library web pages were created, and the automation project was completed. Rapid advances in technology, especially the Web as an information delivery vehicle, also found homes in the library, as licensed web-based databases were added as subscriptions. Some of these had been in a CD-ROM format, or were searched, online, by a Librarian, using specialized search commands. Other projects from the late 90's included a major weeding and print "downsizing" project, due, in part, to the easy delivery of scholarly journals and written reports through digital methods. In 2006, the Career Development Center was relocated to the 3rd floor of GWI, which meant that the 3rd floor was now divided into two parts, each with separate entrances.
As the 21st century begins, the library has, in some ways, radically transformed- moving from a space mostly used for the long-term storage of information in physical volumes into a highly collaborative, digitally agile mechanism for the delivery of knowledge. Its mission hasn’t altered one iota- delivering the highest quality business information in the best format possible to its stakeholders in the Freeman School and across campus.