The morning is a struggle for electrical engineering student Nick Elliott, who is operating on no sleep after pulling an all-nighter to study and finish homework that is now due. He rushes to head toward his two classes in differential equations and circuits, but on the way, he makes a stop at the Alfred Emery Building. There, in the “purple room” of the ASUU Student Child Care Center, he pauses for a moment with his 7-month-old daughter. “I try to set her down and get her used to sitting by herself so she doesn’t freak out when I leave,” he says. In about three hours, after his classes wrap up, Elliott picks her up from the center and tends her for the day while his wife, Alla, who is also a student at the University of Utah, attends her classes and works as an accounting clerk. He says there’s an art to balancing his schooling with responsibilities as a dad and work at Costco, where he spends three nights a week and a full shift on Saturday.

Elliott counts himself lucky to find child care on campus. “There aren’t many places that provide day care services for infants that are affordable,” he says. “When you total up how much it’s going to cost to have day care, it almost makes it insurmountable to finish school. It’s like, ‘Oh, how am I going to do this?’ ”

The University of Utah is trying to make the answer to that question a little easier for student parents and nontraditional students with families. Providing affordable, on-campus child care for students is a high priority as a means to help prevent them from dropping out, alleviate possible debt, and enable them to graduate sooner.

“Our goals are to help, support, and enable our students to focus on their learning, and one of the ways we do that is assuring them that they have great, safe, high-quality spaces for their kids,” says Ruth Watkins, the U’s senior vice president for academic affairs. The University also is providing quality and convenient child care for faculty members as a way to attract and keep them.

About a quarter of the U’s 31,515 students are parents, and an estimated 4,000 children of both students and faculty require some sort of child care, from full-time day care to part-time, hourly services. The University has eight child care programs with a total capacity for 480 children, meaning that only about 10 percent of the child care needs are being met on campus. Yet the U is doing much more than most colleges and universities across the country. In January, the University of Utah was ranked No. 2 in the nation by BestColleges.com as a top school for nontraditional students, and the University is expanding child care and other family-friendly services even as institutions nationwide are cutting back because of funding constraints.

From left, Hanna Kordy, Haylee Puga, and Kate Rasmussen study a plant’s growth, in the University of Utah’s Child and Family Development Center.

The ASUU Student Child Care Center groups children by ages in five rooms painted different colors. The center opened a purple room this past January, to provide part-time hourly care for infants at the U, a first on the campus. Within the past year, the University also added lactation rooms across campus, and starting in May, all new buildings and renovations totaling more than $10 million must include designs for a lactation space. In all, the University now has 21 private rooms for nursing mothers, and three more will be located in the new S.J. Quinney College of Law building when it opens this fall.

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Afamily reading room where parents can study while their children play also opened last fall at the J. Willard Marriott Library, along with three adjacent lactation rooms. And renovation of the Child and Family Development Center, located next to the ASUU care center, is planned for next year.

Debra Daniels, right, director of the U Women’s Resource Center, with student Victoria Farrimond and her daughter Tori Anne.

Lindsey Reichlin, research and program coordinator for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C., says the U’s efforts to provide comprehensive child care options are “fantastic.” “For students with children, child care can be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, factors in a student’s ability to complete college and be successful,” she notes. “It’s the most obvious solution that schools can seek to provide in order to help student parents graduate.”

Even so, fewer colleges nationwide are providing such services. The research institute, which follows women’s policy issues in the United States, released two studies last November that found child care services on campuses across the country are declining, even as the number of student parents is increasing. According to one of the studies, 26 percent of U.S. college students, or 4.8 million undergraduates, have children, and 71 percent of those students are women.

From 1995 to 2011, the number of student parents increased by more than 1.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of four-year institutions providing child care decreased from 54 percent to 51 percent from 2002 to 2013, and federal funding for child care through CCAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents in School) grants dropped from $25 million in 2001 to $14.8 million in 2013. (The University of Utah received one of the coveted grants, totaling $1.3 million, last year.) Students with children also have much higher debt after graduation, the study found.

Reichlin says the numbers are concerning. “When you’re having to balance so many competing responsibilities, child care plays an even greater role,” she says. “Child care is the crux in a lot of ways.”

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The U has made child care a priority, in part, because the unique demographics of both the University and the state of Utah dictate that focus, Watkins says. “I do think that our undergraduate student population is very different than most flagship universities, and I think that puts some special responsibility on us to think about this creatively and assertively.”

A higher proportion of Utahns—28 percent, compared to 22 percent of people nationwide—has taken some college coursework without finishing. “That does tell us that we do have a fair number of working-age adults who have started college but haven’t been able to complete their degrees,” Watkins says.

At the same time, more than half of students at the U are taking six years or longer to graduate, and for the past decade, nearly a third of students enrolled at the U have been over age 25. “That then leads us to question, ‘What’s different about our population and our students?’ ” Watkins says.

Two important factors are that half of undergraduates at the U marry before they complete their degrees, and about a quarter of students have one or more children before graduating. Many students also delay their education to serve religious missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and because those students are older when they return to school, they are often also starting families.

Shauna Lower directs the University of Utah’s Center for Child Care and Family Resources.

“As an institution, possibly the single most important thing we’re working on is increasing the retention and graduation rate of our students,” says Watkins. “So that leads us to look at the most important things to be doing to promote student success, and clearly one of them is to help our students with access to quality child development and child learning opportunities.”

Mary Parker, associate vice president of student affairs at the U, agrees that the picture is different in Utah than in other states, especially when it comes to women in higher education and the number who graduate. “We know we have to do a better job of helping young women understand the importance of an education and how that helps their families.”

According to the U’s Office of Budget and Institutional Analysis, 45 percent of undergraduate students enrolled at the U this year are women, compared to 55 percent who are men. Nationally, more women than men are enrolled in public universities, at a ratio of 56.4 percent to 43.6 percent.

When students begin families, their finances also can become stressed. The U surveys students who are enrolled one semester but not the next, and the number one reason they indicate for not coming back is “financial constraints.”

“Student parents take longer to graduate, and many times it’s because they go to school, work a semester, go to school, work a semester,” says Parker. Once they do leave, she notes, there’s a strong risk they won’t come back. To help students defray some of their costs, the University is utilizing the CCAMPIS funds it received from the U.S. Department of Education to subsidize child care for low income students during the next four years, through the duration of the grant. About 150 families at the U now receive such subsidies each year.

The University has an array of campus child care options. The U’s Center for Child Care and Family Resources manages the ASUU Student Child Care Center, which offers a variety of services such as drop-in evening care, free finals week care, and a “Parent Night Out” one Saturday per month for students. The center, which is open from 7:15 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 6 p.m. on Fridays, serves 160 children ages six weeks to five years. Student parents sign up each semester for the hours they need to cover for study or classes, and a sliding scale based on income is used to calculate cost.

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Shauna Lower, director of the Center for Child Care and Family Resources, says the efforts are making a difference. “There are parents with infants, in particular, who have said, ‘I am so thankful. I wouldn’t be in school right now.’ Some have dissolved into tears when they’ve heard there is a space.”

Other child care programs at the U include the BioKids center, started by faculty in the biology department in 2000. It provides full-time care to children ages six weeks to five years, and generally has about a nine-month waiting list. The Child and Family Development Center, which opened back in 1930, is the oldest program on campus. It primarily serves as a child care development lab for University students studying early childhood and human development, and enrolls children ages 18 months to five years in a three-hour morning or afternoon session.

There’s also the Early Childhood Education Center, a full-time center that mainly serves employees’ children ages two to eight years, and the Fine Arts Preschool for children ages three to six. The full-day University Kids, a private national program run by Children’s Creative Learning Center, enrolls children ages six weeks to eight years, and University Head Start provides morning and afternoon classes for three- and four-year-olds. And then there’s Club U and Youth Academy, summer programs run by U Continuing Education.

“If you’re looking at Pac-12 schools, most of them do not have child care at this level,” Lower says. “Even in the state, having eight programs that serve children in different capacities is pretty unique.” Lower knows firsthand the challenges of juggling school and child care. “I’ve experienced all of this. I’ve taken children to class before, which is an awful experience.” She says she wants to make it easier for students at the U: “I don’t think wanting to be a parent should stop you from going to school.”

Erin Beeghly, a University of Utah assistant professor of philosophy, with her daughter Esme Rivkin in the Marriott Library’s Family Reading Room.

Debra Daniels MSW’84, director of the Women’s Resource Center at the U, notes that by far, women shoulder the responsibility for finding and providing child care. To help, her office provides emergency grants to students each year. The grants, funded by a number of foundations, range from $10 for a needed stroller, formula, or diapers, to thousands of dollars for a child care voucher or help with tuition.

The goal is to keep student parents, especially mothers, in school. “We know that if they step out, the chance is slim to none that they will come back,” she says.

U student Cassie Smith has three young children who are enrolled at the ASUU child care center for a few hours here and there while she goes to class and studies. “I wouldn’t be able to go to school if I didn’t have this,” she says. Her husband just graduated from the U with a master’s degree, and while she has had to take some semesters off due to parenthood, she plans to graduate this summer in elementary education after enrolling six years ago.

Elliott, whose daughter is in the infant room at the ASUU center, says student parents face many challenges that other students don’t. “It’s intimidating, too, because sometimes you may not get the academic performance that you would like maybe because of all the other things that are going on.” But there’s no question that having a child as a student also has its pluses, he says. “It’s surprising how much motivation there comes from that. No matter how stressed you are, you always find little times of thinking, ‘Oh, I get to go see my baby.’ And that cheers you up. It’s weird how that works.”

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The canning jar containing a quart of murky, brownish-yellow water sits at the front of the room. The water has been disinfected with iodine and is unquestionably unappealing. “If anyone wants to try it, we’ve got cups,” Jason Young calls out to the 50 or so investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and industry executives gathered to hear about some of the latest technologies discovered and developed at the University of Utah.

No one grabs a paper cup from the stack for a drink of the cloudy water. But there is plenty of interest in an invention that will make iodine-treated drinking water unnecessary. Young BS’01 MD’10, a business development manager with the University of Utah’s Technology and Venture Commercialization (TVC) office, passes around a prototype of the solar-powered water purification device. No bigger than a cell phone, the white plastic rectangle contains a maze-like framework holding a coiled metal wire arrayed with microscopic titanium dioxide nanotubes. Using ultraviolet light to produce free radicals, the device can decontaminate a liter of water in five minutes. It weighs about one ounce and is expected to retail for around $40.

Ninghai Su, left, a U postdoctoral researcher, and Megan Bulte, an undergraduate student, run tests on Nanoxene, a nanocomposite that may change the way homes are heated.

The water purifier was invented a year ago by Krista Carlson, a research associate with the U’s Metallurgical Engineering Department, and Swomitra Mohanty, a research assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and they are looking for help to get it to market through their company SolaPur. More than a hundred inventions such as their water purifier are disclosed each year at the University, and more than a dozen start-up companies are formed annually to market them. Assisting them is the U’s Technology and Venture Commercialization office. Since 1967, that office and its precursors have been responsible for managing all of the University’s intellectual assets, as well as those of its medical centers and hospitals, the Huntsman Cancer Institute, and ARUP Laboratories. The technology commercialization office has helped launch leading companies such as Myriad Genetics, BioFire Diagnostics, and Anesta, as well as hundreds of lesser-known, smaller start-ups.

Each year, the U office manages dozens of new patents and licenses, invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology development, and brings to the mainstream inventions that range from a compound that could prove to be the next major class of antibiotic to a new type of radiant floor heating. In the last 45 years, 5,500 inventions have been disclosed by researchers and faculty at the University of Utah, and 230 spin-off companies have been launched from those technologies.

“If you think about a modern university, there are traditionally two really big legs of a stool: teaching and research; and those are really important,” says Bryan Ritchie, who has led the University’s TVC office since 2011 as the U’s associate vice president for research commercialization. “What the U has done is legitimize a third leg of the stool, which is commercialization.”

Bryan Ritchie, whose office is in Research Park at the University of Utah, has been the University’s associate vice president for research commercialization since 2011.

Like its counterparts at most universities across the country, the U office has historically handled “technology transfer” and been responsible for licensing inventions to existing companies and start-ups. At that point, it was the licensees’ job to develop and ultimately commercialize the technology. During the past three years, however, the U office has been focusing on building value for inventors and the University through not only licensing and patenting intellectual property but building sustainable ventures and finding viable markets for those inventions. Since the office’s inception in 1967, 21 faculty members have become millionaires by commercializing their inventions, including 15 or 16 in the last decade, and revenue back to the U from the companies and technologies totals tens of millions of dollars each year. “We’re not just transferring but also commercializing and creating ventures,” Ritchie says. “I think we’re really leading the country in how this happens.”

Because the University owns all intellectual property at the U, faculty and researchers must disclose their inventions to the U Technology and Venture Commercialization office. The University does not own the intellectual property of student inventors, so their work with the TVC office is optional. The office currently assists about five to 10 student-led companies. It also works closely with the U’s David Eccles School of Business, which just this fall was ranked by Princeton Review as a top-25 school for entrepreneurship for the fourth straight year. The U tech commercialization office collaborates, too, with the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, which broke ground in October on the new Lassonde Studios student center. Each year, about 40 students also work with the TVC office as interns who assist in the commercialization process.

U Technology Commercialization Numbers

Source: U Technology and Venture Commercialization Office

Darrell M. West, founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organization, applauds the U’s focus on giving faculty the tools they need to create a successful business around their inventions. “That’s where faculty members need help,” he says. “Professors are great coming up with ideas, but it’s hard for them to develop a business and find capital and bring their ideas to market.” Like the U, universities across the country are recognizing that successfully commercializing technologies goes beyond tracking the number of patents filed and start-ups launched each year, he says. “Universities are putting much more effort into commercialization. They know there is value in what is being created by faculty and students.” Commercializing technologies also brings money. “Almost every university is looking for new revenue sources,” West says. “Research and development is a big growth area.”

The U has consistently ranked near the top among universities in the United States for the number of spin-off companies it has created, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. In 2010, the U ranked first in the country, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in creating new start-up companies around research-based inventions, and it was first again in 2011. But the recognition also came with questions about whether the University was starting companies that would last, and Ritchie notes that only 3.4 percent of inventions at the U have produced revenue and just .7 percent have returned more than $1 million to the University.

“At some level, I do think it is important that we are a leader in start-ups, but we don’t have to be No. 1,” Ritchie says. “If we’re in the top five, I’m really pretty happy. It’s only one metric; it’s only one measurement. It’s an important one, but by itself, it doesn’t mean all that much because we could start a hundred companies that weren’t worth anything, and who cares, right? So we do want to start a lot of companies, but we want to start a lot of good companies. We want to create the foundation for these companies to succeed.”

Cynthia Furse, the University of Utah’s associate vice president for research, stands in an electromagnetic anechoic chamber for measuring antennas, at the U’s College of Engineering, where she is a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The focus is now less on the number of start-ups and more on the quality of management, investment, and structure of the start-up, he says. The University’s new vision also came with a new name. Formerly the Technology Commercialization Office, TCO became TVC last year to emphasize its dedication to building ventures.

Past practice too often shelved inventions after they were disclosed, and that was the end, Ritchie says. Now, after an invention is disclosed, his office makes contact with the inventor within two weeks and begins assessing the technology, its possible applications, and options for commercializing it. The office then helps protect the intellectual property by completing patent filings. Next, staff members gather feedback from experts and define milestones to help bring the invention to market.

Ritchie also has started an “engine process” at the U. Every eight weeks, the Technology and Venture Commercialization office brings in about 100 industry executives, entrepreneurs, and private investors from across the country to attend “engine meetings.” There, researchers and inventors present their latest inventions and technologies. The company executives sometimes decide one of the inventions is worth their investment, but mostly they advise TVC staff on how to assess the potential of the technology, and they aid with networking and identifying markets. The business leaders even advise on whether an invention is worth continued investment from the TVC office. Last year, the office put more than $500,000 into University of Utah technologies for development.

Bradley Collings, a businessman who has launched several of his own information technology and records storage companies, is a regular at the engine meetings. Collings, who lives in South Jordan, Utah, began attending after TVC leaders invited him, because he thought it would be a good networking outlet. He now volunteers tens of hours each week as a business mentor to faculty members and TVC staff. The thrill of starting up a company and moving inventions from lab to market keeps him coming back, he says. “Don’t kid yourself: There are some amazing technologies coming out of the University, and I think people are recognizing that.”

The “engine process” also is used to identify inventions and technologies that have no chance at commercialization, Ritchie says. “Some people see us as a gardener over here, and maybe that’s true to some degree, but we’re also an executioner. We want to make sure we’re not putting resources and time into things that don’t have an opportunity, and we want to learn that as fast as we can.”

Ritchie knows firsthand the intricacies of creating a company. He began his career in the computer industry, developing products for companies including Iomega, Megahertz, and Novell. Fluent in Thai and Laotian, he spent a year in Asia working under a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. He also owned and sold two of his own companies, both in the computer industry. “My first company was wildly successful and took off, just exploded. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this entrepreneurship thing is pretty easy.’ My second company was a slog,” says Ritchie, who holds an MBA from Brigham Young University and a doctorate in political economy from Emory University. “It was so hard, and we ended up exiting and selling, but not in a way that made us very much money. I learned far more from the second venture than I did from the first.”

After launching his companies, Ritchie worked as an economics professor at Michigan State University for a decade before coming to the U. He has a patent pending at Michigan State for technology he invented to convert biomass into alternative energy and is currently going through that institution’s technology transfer process. “Michigan State is like most universities. They’re almost waiting for a lucky bounce of the ball to have someone come in and pick it up.”

Cynthia Furse BS’86 MS’88 PhD’94, associate vice president for research at the U and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, agrees that the TVC office’s work is much different than what other universities are doing. “I originally had this delusion, and it is a delusion, that the scientist takes their idea and tosses it over the fence to the business community, who then markets it,” says Furse, who started her own company, LiveWire Innovation, in 2002. “That’s a brilliant idea, but it doesn’t work. So you have to do a combination of teaching the technologists about business and teaching the business side about technology, and that’s when you see how it starts fitting together.”

Dustin Williams, left, a U professor of orthopedics, and Ryan Looper, an associate professor of chemistry, worked with the Technology and Venture Commercialization office to create a company to market their antimicrobial compounds.

Furse is working with TVC to find markets for LiveWire, which produces handheld devices that detect faults in electrical wires. The technology is replacing outdated, cumbersome, and sometimes dangerous equipment in mines and could be used by the airline industry to find faulty wiring in planes.

Another start-up company the TVC office is assisting, Curza, was created last year to commercialize antimicrobial research by Dustin Williams PhD’12, a U research professor of orthopedics, and Ryan Looper, U associate professor of chemistry. Curza is in the process of commercializing more than 130 classes of the chemical compounds that kill, disperse, and inhibit growth of bacterial biofilms, including those that have developed antibiotic resistance. The researchers have secured two patents and 12 provisional patents and are working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prepare for clinical trials. The hope is that the compounds can be used in an ointment to treat serious wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers or military injuries. The compounds could also be used in industrial settings to disperse bacteria buildup.

Feng Liu, chair of the U’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is working with the TVC office to commercialize Nanoxene, a multi-component nanocomposite he discovered that may change the way homes are heated. The substance graphene is a key ingredient of the material, which Liu paints onto plastic sheets that have electrodes on each end to conduct heat. The sheets can be laid under flooring to provide radiant heating. Liu has received a provisional patent and hopes to market his technology in the next two years to the high-end home market through his new company, Life-E.

SolaPur’s Carlson and Mohanty expect to begin taking orders for their water purification device next July, and plan to market it to backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The purifier was a huge hit at last year’s Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, where they showed a prototype. The solar device also may eventually be used on a larger scale to help in developing nations that lack ready sources of clean drinking water.

At the recent U meeting where the device was presented to investors and industry leaders, Young, from the U’s Technology and Venture Commercialization office, noted that it could be very appealing to the 8.7 million backpackers in the United States who make up an estimated $435 million market, or to anyone for that matter who doesn’t like the taste of iodine. At the end of his pitch, he pointed once again to the jar of discolored liquid. “Anyone thirsty? We still have this water up here.”

–Kim M. Horiuchi is an associate editor of Continuum.

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Luise Poulton casually holds out the small, unassuming—even plain-looking—book. It lacks the exquisite line drawings, the delicate rice-paper pages, the elegant typeface, and even the literary credentials of many of the other books in the University of Utah’s rare book collection.

“It’s a tiny little book. It’s not very fat, it’s not very tall, and it’s very unprepossessing. The paper isn’t particularly great,” says Poulton BA’01, the rare books manager at the U’s J. Willard Marriott Library. “There’s nothing fancy about it.” But this book is likely the most valuable of the 80,000 pieces in the University’s rare book collection. It’s a treasure among treasures, all of which visitors are free to handle, touch, and read from cover to cover.

That includes this deceivingly valuable little Book of Commandments, or a surviving original of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo, or the first novel Charles Dickens wrote (at age 25), or a tome of sacred Buddhist writings from China printed in 1440, 10 years before Gutenberg’s famous press.

“Here, you want to hold a million dollars?” Poulton says as she hands over the palm-sized Book of Commandments, written in 1830 and containing Mormon church founder Joseph Smith’s description of what he said were his revelations from God. The book, which sat in his brother Hyrum Smith’s library, was donated to the U by LDS Church leader John M. Whitaker in 1969. The U Rare Books Division also has one of only two known copies of the Book of Mormon inscribed by Joseph Smith; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns the other. But the Mormon pieces are, by far, not the only storied stories.

The Marriott Library is home to one of the top rare book collections west of the Mississippi. The books are shelved in the library’s “inner sanctum,” a 7,000-square-foot, humidity-controlled, secured vault kept cold—between 58 and 62 degrees—and dark, with posted signs demanding, “Lights Out! Lights Out!” Stretching 120 feet long by 80 feet wide, the vault houses the world’s third-largest collection of Arabic papyrus, the largest collection of medieval facsimiles in the state, and the largest collection of fine press and artists’ books in the region. The books are brought to the vault after cataloguing in a “staging area,” but they don’t stay in the vault.

Poulton’s strong belief is that anyone who desires should have access to the collection—from a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible printed between 1450 and 1455 to Isaac Newton’s first-edition Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, an “extremely valuable book” that was printed in 1687 and is worth up to a half-million dollars. Poulton describes her job as balancing security and access. She shoulders the task of safeguarding the books, a responsibility that she acknowledges makes her nervous and keeps her up at night. But just as important, she says, is ensuring access to the books and making them as available as possible. “And I love that. I love the idea that you don’t have to come in with a letter from the president of Harvard to see these books. I love it that anyone—anyone—can walk into that room and say, ‘I’d like to see this book,’ and they get to see it.”

While other universities and institutions around the world may have larger, more impressive collections, Poulton marvels that the University of Utah, a public university, has the collection it does. “This is not Yale’s Beinecke Library, this is not Princeton’s library that has two full copies of the Gutenberg Bible. This is not Oxford. This is not Bibliothèque de Paris. This is a state institution,” she says, “and we have these things.”

U student Matthew Scholl, left, examines a page of a Gutenberg Bible, with Luise Poulton.

The way Poulton speaks about the renowned collection reflects her own background. As a young ballet dancer working in New York, she realized she had advanced as far as she could and needed a degree, so she came to the U as a student in the Ballet Department but ended up switching majors and graduating in history. Of Rare Books’ latest exhibition, Fighting Words: American Revolutionary War Pamphlets, which took months to curate, she says with a dancer’s aplomb: “We want the end-product to look effortless, like any good performance, right?” She rattles off an intricate history of each book but in the next breath betrays a performer’s anticipatory excitement: “The props that I have are just so incredible.”

Poulton has worked at the Marriott Library for the past 20 years, including the last 15 with Rare Books, and her enthusiasm for the job is palpable. She wants everyone to have the sensory experience of holding a centuries-old book—to not just touch it while leafing through pages but to inhale the mustiness of a book’s scent, to hear the thick rustle of pages made from rag paper, to see the fine craftsmanship of books that were early printers’ pride and joy, to handle ideas that were revolutionary.

“To hold a copy of Common Sense, printed in 1776, that was held by hands in 1776, and most likely read out loud to other people in 1776, that’s a connection. That’s a very physical and visceral connection,” Poulton says. And anyone can have that experience, by visiting the Rare Books room during its regular hours, Monday through Saturday. A staff member usually supervises the visits.

The power of holding these books is unmistakable. “There’s just nothing like it,” she says. But equally powerful are the stories behind each book, and the paths of the books through history. Among the most compelling is that of the U’s copy of Galileo’s Dialogo. Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed in 1632. The book’s discourse on astronomy and Galileo’s contention that Nicholas Copernicus was correct in postulating that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the Earth drew the ire of the Catholic Church.

The church considered the book so dangerous that Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, placed under house arrest until his death, and prohibited from publishing any future books. The Dialogo was placed on the Inquisition’s list of forbidden books and remained there until 1835. Most of the copies were destroyed. It is believed only about 200 copies survived, and somehow, some way, one of those copies made its way to the U, hidden away and changing hands throughout the centuries.

Other highlights among the scientific books in the U’s collection include Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, the oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today. The first-edition copy, also among the U’s most valuable at $185,000 to $200,000, was printed in 1482 by famous German printer Erhard Ratdolt. “This was his book,” Poulton says, pointing out Ratdolt’s “self-congratulatory blurb” on the first page, in which he describes the quality of work his shop produces. Or there’s the first-edition Novum Organum, printed 138 years later, in which Francis Bacon disagrees with Aristotle to set “the stage for a new way of seeing, studying, and understanding the world around us.”

The pieces are among the “big guns” in the U’s science collection, Poulton says. But the science collection is just one part of “a world-renowned archives,” says book dealer Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sanders Rare Books store in Salt Lake City. There are “hundreds of significant collections housed at the library, any one of which could provide a student a master’s thesis and a lifetime of research,” he says. One of the U’s rare pieces, an aquatint by Karl Bodmer featured in the 1839 book by German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, is now on display at the Smithsonian through January 27.

But Poulton finds the simple stories of some of the books in the U’s collection to be as compelling as those of the grander works. She recalls curating an exhibition of 18th-century multi-volume herbal books. In one of the volumes, a dried plant had been pressed on a page that matched the picture of that plant. “This was at least a 200-year-old book,” Poulton says, “and who knows when that particular specimen was added in that 200 years and by whom—and why just that one, and why didn’t they keep going, or maybe they did and the rest fell out. So there’s the find. There’s this very personal touch, and then there are all these questions. So I love knowing. I also love the mystery.”

Like the discovery she stumbled upon in a lesser-known book given as a gift to a woman. Poulton doesn’t even remember the book’s title, but in it, she found an inscription by inventor Nikola Tesla. “I just flipped out,” she says. “I called one of my sisters and said, ‘You won’t believe this.’ ” Poulton’s students have had similar experiences. Just this fall, Poulton was giving a lecture on artist books, which are unique, newer books in the collection, mostly made in the 20th century. “One of those students was looking at a book smaller than a cell phone and burst into tears. I mean, lost it,” Poulton says. The text was about charity and quoted the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides.

“I’ve had reactions like that often. It gets to be personal. … The smell, the touch, the sound really does have meaning to it. It’s the difference between getting an ‘I love you’ in an email and getting a hug in person,” Poulton says.

Emily Michelson, a history professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland who taught at the U from 2006 to 2009, says those stories and the experiences they elicit are extremely valuable. In Utah, she brought her students every semester to visit the Rare Books room. “It was enormously important for the students,” Michelson says. “Often the books were the oldest man-made objects they had ever seen, much less held.”

Poulton says she is always striving to expand the “depth and breadth” of the collection. “I have a wish list that’s five million lines long and a Microsoft-worth of money.” Besides expanding the collection, Poulton also is working to digitize many of its works so that readers can look at them online. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, given her desire for people to physically hold the books and equal wish for the greatest accessibility. She can’t help but think the early printers from centuries ago would feel the same way.

“I can see them saying on the one hand, ‘Wow, what a great idea,’ because part of the reason for Gutenberg developing printing with movable type was out of an obvious need for more copies of less expensive books. On the other hand, they did make a big deal about making what they produced beautiful.” Poulton—who doesn’t own a Kindle, has “no plans to get a Kindle,” and won’t use an iPad because it has no keyboard—can relate: “Texting is a great example. That’s not spelling,” she says.

Yet that modern-day dilemma is another example of what makes the rare books so intriguing. By handling and touching the books, it is easy to grasp that they are the reflection of real lives and real people who grappled with many of the same everyday circumstances that exist today. Their stories are rich, and the stories behind them even richer.

“The rewarding part is sheer selfishness,” Poulton says. “This is what I do. This is what I am surrounded by. To give students a context as to why they should care about some musty old books and see their reaction, that’s the most gratifying thing.”

—Kim M. Horiuchi is a longtime journalist and freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

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