Renovating a Library

This story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 1, 2006 issue, really resonated with me. I am faced with the task of renovating not a "dull 1960s box," but rather a drab, monolithic 1970s poured concrete structure that was not built with an eye to modularity. We have been faced with the same hard choices as the librarians at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. We too are desperately in need of more study space and of more group study space in particular. At the same time, our collection long ago outgrew the stack space available to house it. We have moved aggressively to convert parts of our collection to microformat (which caused its own storage issues) and have also begun to rely more on electronic access to some materials, such as Shepard's. This was necessary because our renovation, like Cal Poly's, will not create more stack space. We have created a website devoted to our renovation project, which is our way of keeping our community informed about the changes to their library.