In advance of a scheduled visit by Vice President Joe Biden to dedicate the opening of the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library on Friday, USC granted members of the media a preliminary tour last week of the $18 million facility connected to the Thomas Cooper Library in Columbia.

Digital projects manager Patricia Sasser uses the Hollings library’s new large format book scanner, the first one of its kind installed in a United States library. Photo by Jonathan Sharpe.

The new three-level, 50,000-square-foot library houses the South Carolina Political Collections, which director Herb Hartsook says is one of the largest collections anywhere and includes the papers of 23 congressmen and 11 governors. Not all of the records are public yet, such as those of sitting Republican politicians U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Congressman Joe Wilson and Gov. Mark Sanford, among others. There is no hard-and-fast rule as to when material becomes public, but the library abides by stipulations set forth by donors and does not make available the collections of those still in office.

A testament to South Carolina’s reputation as a political mud pit, Hartsook says the library knows of at least two previous incidents of political operatives attempting to do opposition research on a politician by trying to weasel their way into the closed collections.

Nobody had better try it again, though — security is watertight.

Also inside the new library is the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. It is the first LEED-certified, public book-viewing room and spans more than 200 years of collecting, according to director Patrick Scott.

“We have materials here as good as you can get anywhere in the country,” Scott says. “We say anyone can use it as long as they have clean hands, a pure heart and a picture ID.”

Major collections include first editions of John Milton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, among others.

On the top level are display cases where the public will be able to view a rotating collection of select documents and materials. Downstairs, more than 150,000 rare books are kept in shiny, climate-controlled, high-density movable electronic bookshelves dazzling with digital lights that resemble something out of a James Bond film. They will hold approximately 20 million manuscripts, political papers, maps and framed items — including the hood of an old car painted by famous syndicated political cartoonists.

Also housed in the Hollings Special Collections Library, on the second level, are digital collections. Complete with a state-of-the-art scanner that looks like an open tanning bed hoisted by crane, the collections include thousands of hours of audio and visual collections along with scanned books, papers and documents.

Librarian Kate Boyd, who works with the machine, calls it a “very impressive piece of equipment.”

Even the trash cans in the processing room are festooned with political memorabilia, such as bumperstickers dating back to the campaigns of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.

Former governor and U.S. Senator Hollings was instrumental in securing $14 million in federal funding for the building and gave his personal papers to the university in 1989, beginning a trend among politicians that continues to this day.