Noted geotechnical engineer to donate library to URI
Lecture by seepage expert follows dedication ceremony

KINGSTON, R.I. -- October 23, 2000 -- North Kingstown resident Milton E. Harr, a retired professor of geotechnical engineering at Purdue University and a leading expert on the seepage of fluids through soils, will donate his extensive personal library to the University of Rhode Island's College of Engineering at a ceremony on November 3.

The ceremony will be held at 1:30 p.m. in Kirk Auditorium on URI's Kingston Campus, and will be followed by a lecture by Harr on "Elephants, the Internet and Engineering."

Harr taught for 40 years at Purdue and wrote four books, including a classic text on seepage theory. He served as a consultant to dozens of major corporations and government agencies, and he is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering. Because of his geotechnical expertise, he was invited to help design NASA's first lunar landing module and lectured around the world.

"Milt is a giant in the field of geotechnical engineering," said William Kovacs, professor of civil engineering at URI and a long-time friend of Harr. "He even learned Russian so he could read Russian geotechnical texts." Many advances in seepage theory have been made in Russia.

Harr's personal library includes nearly 2,000 books, reports, reference manuals and dissertations from the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. Among them are several hundred written in Russian.

Harr's library will be housed in the offices of URI's Department of Civil Engineering and will be used by graduate students studying geotechnical engineering.

"We'd also like to open up the library for use by practicing engineers in the area," noted Kovacs. "We hope this will open up communication between the classroom and the professionals who our students will eventually be working with."

For Information: William Kovacs 874-2500, Todd McLeish 874-7892