More than 2,000 guests—students, alumni, faculty and University staff—partied throughout the first floors of the Perkins and Bostock libraries and the von der Heyden Pavilion on Friday, 23 February, from 9-midnight.  Subdued lighting, pedestal tables swathed in colorful spandex linens, gourmet desserts, cash bars, and two jazz bands, one in the Pavilion and the other in Bostock, transformed the library complex into an elegant club-like setting.

The Party, with more than thirty campus sponsors and assistance from the Duke University Libraries, was proposed and planned by two Duke seniors, Rachel Weeks and Haley Hoffman, who are also the originators of the “Work Hard, Play Well” campaign on campus.  Weeks and Hoffman conceived the idea of having a party in the library as a way of encouraging the campus community to come to see a photographic display of campus student life that they created from reproductions of hundreds of images from the University Archives.