The Albert F. and Doris M. Connolly General Library Endowment was established in 2007 by Bruce Connolly (’59) in honor of his parents. Albert, a second-generation American, left high school in the early 1920s and began a lifelong career in the printing industry. In addition to his work, he was also an accomplished piano player. Bruce’s mother, Doris Paré, was a graduate of Fitchburg Normal School in Massachusetts. After rearing Bruce and his sister, Sheila, Doris served as a librarian for the local public library.

Albert and Doris instilled in their children a deeply held, lifelong faith, and stimulated a spirit of inquiry and a love of books, which led to a lifetime of reading. Feeling compelled to appropriately recognize his parents and Notre Dame for their joint role in his formative years, nurturing his faith and providing the educational foundation for his fruitful career in the private sector, Bruce established this unrestricted fund to provide opportunities in perpetuity for all members of the Notre Dame community to engage in learning and reading, both for pleasure and for the acquisition of knowledge. General funds, such as this, are vital to the Hesburgh Libraries as they annually fund the areas of greatest need.