Alumnus John T. O’Connor CE’55 has generously made his personal library of environmental engineering publications available online to the Cooper community. With the remainder of Spring semester courses being conducted remotely, Dr. O’Connor reached out to the Cooper Library about sharing his digitized collection with faculty and students.

"My thought in putting forth my library was that a new generation of Cooper instructors who will be teaching online courses might benefit from archives of specialized literature,” he says. The collection, which is hosted by the American Chemical Society, is accessible through the website of Dr. O’Connor’s firm, H2O’C Engineering, and is also linked via the Cooper Library’s remote resources guide.

“My American Chemical Society member’s collection is a potpourri of slide shows and technical reports on sanitary and environmental engineering history, chemistry, water and wastewater treatment facilities design and operation—intermixed with research, operator training, and relevant literature reviews," explains Dr. O’Connor.

A former faculty member and dean at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Dr. O’Conner has contributed research and award-winning articles to journals in environmental science and engineering. He earned his Master of Science in Civil Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology and his EngD in Sanitary Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University. His book,  Water Treatment: Plant Performance Evaluations and Operations (Wiley, 2009), is available through the Cooper Library’s Wiley eBook Collection.

“Professor O’Connor’s work in environmental engineering—most notably his research in water and wastewater treatment—continue to be heavily cited and relevant to the field,” says Lisa Norberg, Acting Director of the Library. “As a former student worker in the Cooper Union Library, Dr. O’Connor recognized the impact the Library’s closure would have on student and faculty access to information. The thoughtful and generous act of making his books and articles freely available online through the Library exemplifies The Cooper Union ethos of active citizenship.”