Virtual reality and smoothie bars: What’s in at Bay Area university libraries?

Academic Libraries | Library Design | User Experience

College students still need help finding and interpreting information.

By Emily DeRuy | ederuy@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: July 10, 2017 at 6:00 am | UPDATED: July 10, 2017 at 11:03 am

Rodrigo Gris, a summer session student from Spain studying art history, works in one of the new study carrels in Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday, July 6, 2017. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group)

Librarians at UC Berkeley are holding workshops for students on what to do with the information they collect using drones. At Stanford, they’re experimenting with virtual reality. And across the Bay Area, as more textbooks gather dust and coursework moves online, universities are reimagining their libraries.

“We’re like fish,” said Sonoma State University librarian Karen Schneider. “If we don’t keep swimming, we die.” 

University libraries used to warehouse knowledge, but they’re places where it’s created now. And that, students and school officials say, makes them more relevant than ever.

Numbers back up that notion. While book circulation is down at each of the libraries the Bay Area News Group surveyed, the number of students using library space is up.

Librarians say students are looking for places where they can take the work they do individually online and use it to collaborate as part of a team in the real world.

“The digital age has actually raised the importance of spaces for people to actually come together,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, Cal’s librarian and chief digital scholarship officer. Read more...

A Library From the Future Arrives In Denmark | Michaela Cavanagh | Dec 20, 2016

Public libraries | Library Design | Library Trends | Technology in Libraries

In Aarhus, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of how a public place for learning should function.

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

 

 

It’s hard not feel as if you’ve just visited the library of the future after spending a day at Dokk1.
In a formerly industrial part of Aarhus, egg chairs are now sprinkled around the periphery of the massive new “hybrid library.” There, a three-ton tubular bell called The Gong echoes through every time a child is born at the local hospital. Outside, a ferry to Copenhagen comes and goes from the harbor while kids and adults play across a field with teeter-totters, a tire swing, and a huge slide in the shape of an eagle.

Opened in 2015, Dokk1 is more than Scandinavia’s largest library—it’s a community hub that meets the changing needs of Denmark’s second largest city. Last summer, Dokk1 was named the Public Library of the Year by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). As the notion that libraries simply serve as a home for books dissolves, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of what a library should be. Read more...

Beneath New York Public Library, Shelving Its Past for High-Tech Research Stacks By TOM MASHBERGNOV. 15, 2015

he New York Public Library is creating a vast underground space for its research collection, after abandoning plans to move much of it to New Jersey. CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

As they skate or snack in Bryant Park, visitors might dismiss the statelyNew York Public Library next door as a dog-eared relic in an age of digital information.

But unbeknown to most of them, 17 feet below ground, in a concrete bunker worthy of the White House, the library is expanding and updating one of the most sophisticated book storage systems in the world.

Since March, after abandoning a much-criticized plan to move the bulk of its research collection to New Jersey, the library has been working instead to create a high-tech space underground for the 2.5 million research works long held in its original stacks.

Read more....

7 Classrooms: library as pedagogical incubator - The Ubiquitous Librarian - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Three years ago we had two classrooms in our library. They looked like this:

The former “training-based” classrooms at VT Library. Photo: R. Miller

These were suitable for training-based instruction but our program
has evolved. Librarians wanted to be able to reach more students (larger
class sizes) as well as utilize many different teaching methods.

We’re
upgrading both rooms this summer.

read more...

Yeshiva University News » Gottesman Library to Get Makeover

New Design Will Create Updated Student-Focused Research and Study Center


The Mendel Gottesman Library,
research center and student hub at Yeshiva University’s Wilf campus,
will soon undergo a major renovation. Thanks to a generous donation from
David S. Gottesman, former chairman of the YU Board of Trustees, and
his wife, Ruth, the library is receiving a complete overhaul that will
see the ground level through the fourth floor revamped. Mr. Gottesman, a
grandson of Mendel Gottesman, also participated in the planning and
design of the library.

The library renovations will feature new floor-to-ceiling windows

“The library was completed in 1969 and has really terrific features,
but modes of study and learning have changed significantly since then,”
said Dean of YU’s Libraries Pearl Berger. “Fifty or 60 years ago, the
primary function of library buildings was to house collections. While
library collections retain great significance, today’s university
libraries are student-centered and are designed to support the variety
of learning activities in which students engage. The planned renovation
is focused upon our students, with the aim of creating library
environments that support student needs.”








“Times have changed, but the facility has essentially remained the
same,” said Vice President for Administrative Services Jeffrey
Rosengarten, who is spearheading the project. “We knew that as a leading
academic research institution, we needed to focus on updating the
library to meet 21st century demands.” Read more...

Alicia Martin Biografias - YouTube

Alicia Martin Biografias - YouTube

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