The Robert S. Young Library is located on the fourth floor of the Westside Classroom Building, the location of the Ancell School of Business of Western Connecticut State University. The Library was opened in October 1982 as a memorial to Danbury businessman Robert S. Young, former President of Fairfield Processing. The Library operates with funds from the State of Connecticut and a generous endowment from the Young family.
Organized much like a corporate library and patterned after the Baker Library’s Core collection at the Harvard Business School, this business library supports the departments of accounting, finance, management, marketing, management information systems, and partial support for the Division of Justice and Law Administration.
There is an excellent reference section consisting of business handbooks, almanacs, encyclopedias, and directories, both print and online. Through the Library’s homepage (http://library.wcsu.edu/) users have access to the Internet and the many online services to which the Library subscribes. Several very popular ones are EBSCOhost’s Business Source Premier and Academic Search Premier and Lexis-Nexis, which index and provide full-text articles in academic, business, financial, medical, and legal journals. Westlaw (legal material), Business NewsBank (newspaper articles), Checkpoint (tax research), Advisor on the Web (human resources), Datamonitor Business Information Center, and Mergent Online, as well as many databases from the FirstSearch web-based collection, are also available providing well-rounded and comprehensive resources for the library’s clientele. The homepage also provides links to Reference Internet Sources and a comprehensive subject guide to sources. The library subscribes to many business journals, and networking facilities can provide journal articles and books from other libraries in a timely fashion.
Throughout the year, the librarians provide bibliographic instruction and library user education classes to familiarize students and faculty with sources and to assist them in their research. Individual instruction is available upon request. The library is open to the public and librarians are happy to help.
Additionally, the Ruth A. Haas Library provides numerous sources also valuable to business, including federal government documents, education sources, and an extensive liberal arts collection. A computerized shared catalog connects both WCSU libraries with the other Connecticut State University libraries providing expanded resource sharing.
Danbury businessman Robert S. Young was an early supporter of the Ancell School of Business. He wanted the school to go beyond classes and become a forum for the discussion of business ethics, business morality and corporate social responsibility. A year after his death in 1980, his family donated funds that made the library that bears his name a reality.
Young was President of Fairfield Processing, the country’s largest producer of polyester fiber used for filling pillows, quilts and toys. The process for making the fiber, called Poly-Fil, was invented by Young’s father but it was Robert who guided the company’s phenomenal growth, turning Fairfield Processing into the country’s largest producer of the fiber. With Robert Young’s untimely death in 1980, his brother, Roy, took over the company. The family then looked for a way to honor Robert’s memory.
The library was a logical choice. At the time of his death, Robert was a member of the Corporate College Council, a group of area businesses that advises college officials on areas of need in the business community that could be served by curriculum changes at the college.
