Finals, spring term, 1996. A student crams at a table at the feet
of the conquistador in the Orozco murals in the Baker Library.
Fast forward to the end of spring term 2006. A student crams at the same table
at the same conquistador's feet. But elsewhere in the renovated and expanded
library, the scene has changed. One student combines digital map overlays at a
computer work desk. Another browses through course materials in the open reserve
room. A reference librarian and an academic computing consultant give a
multimedia-assisted presentation to a Chaucer seminar. An environmental studies
professor uses the academic technology development center in creating software
for her new course. In the library cafe, several students are comparing their
reactions to a video they have watched earlier for an anthropology class.
Such is the vision provided by the college Library Building Committee's preliminary "program" for the renovation of Baker Library and construction of the adjoining Berry building. This new library complex will serve as a gateway to information, whether printed, digitized or in some other format, whether stored on the premises or retrieved from some distant location. The result of two-and-half years of work by various campus committees--including four months of intensive work by the building committee--the program outlines how existing facilities and services should be changed and augmented in the new facility. It describes how those facilities and services should relate to each other and proposes in a preliminary way how much space each might occupy.
After the program planning document is approved by Provost Lee Bollinger, it will provide detailed guidance to the architects from the firms Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates and Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott as they design the new building--a process that will occupy the architects and the Library Building Committee during much of the 1996-97 academic year. If all goes as planned, the new library will open in the year 2000.
The building committee will hold a public information session on May 24 at 3:30 p.m. in 3 Rockefeller to explain the program and to gather comments from members of the Dartmouth community.
Libraries are considered to be "at capacity" when their stacks are 80 percent full, a point that Baker Library had reached in the 1980s. Space for users and staff had long been inadequate as well. Consequently, the library staff already had begun to plan for renovations when, in October 1993, John W. Berry '44; his son, George Berry '66; George F. Baker III (great-grandson and namesake of the original benefactor of Baker Library) and the Loren M. Berry Foundation (established by John Berry's father) gave the college a total of $30 million for a new library.
President James O. Freedman convened a Task Force on the Library of the 21st Century to examine the college's library use and future needs. Chaired by William C. Scott, Humanities Distinguished Research Professor and professor of classics, the task force issued a report in May 1995 calling for a library complex designed with maximum flexibility by including a variety of spaces for study, learning and research and ready to adjust to emerging technologies. The Library Building Committee was then appointed by Provost Bollinger to turn the task force's concepts into detailed recommendations. Guided by the Report of the Task Force on the Library of the 21st Century and by suggestions from across the Dartmouth community, the building committee identified and described services and facilities that are essential for the expanded library. Working with the architects, rough estimates were developed for the square footage of each proposed part of the new complex and by March it had become clear that including all the proposed elements would require more than 280,000 "net square feet" (the gross square footage minus such "non-programmable" areas as rest rooms, closets and halls)--about 80,000 net square feet more than would be possible to build. (Baker contains approximately 120,000 net square feet and Berry would contain an additional 80,000). Then began the challenging task of deciding which elements were most important to include. Throughout the nearly three years since the gift was made, the task force and the committee have met with groups of faculty, college staff members and students and have visited nearly a dozen new and under-construction libraries. Geoffrey Freeman of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott has provided the building committee with guidance drawn from his extensive experience planning libraries at Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Emory, the University of Southern California, Northwestern and Chicago.
At the heart of the planning process are difficult, even unanswerable, questions about how much and in what forms the library should provide information in the years to come. After extensive research, the building committee developed planning parameters for the growth of each of the various information formats--print, electronic, microtext and multimedia. These projections and the rationales behind them are detailed in the Report of the Subcommittee on Information Resources and Collection Management, copies of which are available via BlitzMail from Library Building Committee Chair John G. Crane. "Thinking carefully about what we know about the future of libraries and information technology has been the key to planning a library that will serve Dartmouth faculty, students and staff well into the next century," says Librarian of the College Margaret Otto.
-- Rebecca Bailey