Campus Community Update #223

January 31, 2008
 

Renovation Over, But Momentum Continues

With completion of construction on floors 4 and 5, the library’s 18 month renovation project, begun in summer 2006, is drawing to a close.  In the past weeks and months the construction trailer has left Lot 6 and the fences have come down, restoring a large area of parking that had been displaced by the project.

Construction was sometimes inconvenient and disruptive, both for the library’s customers and for its employees, but now, inside and out,  the improvements and benefits are evident everywhere:

• A redesigned first floor, featuring the Spidell Technology Center, the largest and best equipped student computing facility on campus
• New, more functional Circulation Desk
• New public rest rooms on first floor; refurbishing of all other rest rooms
• Introduction of a Starbucks internet café
• New glass walls, carpeting, paint, and tile throughout the building
• Replacement of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment and ductwork
• Increased spaces designed for collaborative group study
• New entry doors and peripheral landscaping
• A spacious "Grand Reading Room" on fifth floor with views of the Pyramid, the harbor, and Catalina

Even with all that’s been accomplished some of the biggest improvements growing out of the project haven’t yet been realized. 2008 holds the promise of three more landmark accomplishments:

• ORCA (Online Remote Collections Access), the library’s robotic access and retrieval system for materials not housed in the book stacks, will be filled and put into service. Built at the southeast corner of the library building adjacent to parking lot 6, it will be capable of housing 850,000 volumes and delivering any of them to the Circulation Desk within five minutes
• The Arnold T. Schwab Graduate Study Center will open at the southeast corner of fifth floor. This facility, restricted to graduate students and faculty, will provide a comfortable and functional site for study, discussion, and research for a population whose demands upon the library’s print and electronic scholarly resources tend to be particularly intense and sustained
• Better wireless connectivity building-wide, and additional electrical outlets and capacity by late spring, 2008