What could the library of the future look like?
In Library Journal, an article about North Carolina State University's new Hunt Library -- based on this and comments from folks who have toured it, a stunning model of an academic library and learning center of the future.
Tomorrow, Visualized | Library by Design
By Meredith Schwartz on September 18, 2013
As I got ready to tour the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, last spring, as part of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) meeting held nearby, the buzz about the newly unveiled building had reached such a level that I expected to find it, however cool, overhyped.
It wasn’t. It was exactly the right amount of hyped.
“Every corner of the Hunt Library is designed to be memorable and stunning,” the library’s vision claims. Grandiose as that might sound, those corners deliver.
In an era in which many libraries even at great institutions are struggling to do enough with less, it’s refreshing to see a university able and willing to invest in the library as both the symbolic and the operational core of the institution. The project was funded by $115.2 million in state appropriations, plus donor support.
BUILDING AN INSPIRATION
The vision for the Hunt Library is ambitious in the extreme: to “create spaces that encourage collaboration, reflection, creativity, and awe” and “to be a place not of the past but of the future.” The university made such an investment because it feels the library will be a competitive advantage. “A signature library,” Susan K. Nutter, vice provost and director of the NCSU Libraries and the 2005 LJ Librarian of the Year, explains “would help us recruit the very best students and the very best faculty and to serve the community as an inspiring place of excellence and passion and ideas and vision…. You cannot be in this building without realizing that something very important is happening at this university.”
“This building was designed from the start to be an icon, a dramatic representation of how transformational technology and a commitment to the growth of our community will thrust [NCSU] even further into the foreground,” said Chancellor W. Randolph Woodson when the library officially opened in April.
The library is indeed iconic and anchors the universities’ new Centennial campus. One of the ways it does so is in the thoughtful integration of technology. For all that the Hunt features cutting-edge technology deeply baked into its design, it never gives the impression that any piece of tech is there only because it can be. Each piece has been thought through to serve a present user need, as well as to adapt to changing needs of the future.
“Much of the design strategy behind the [library] was to pour our resources into the sorts of spaces and technologies that support NC State’s reputation for producing students and researchers who live easily and naturally with technology and learn through collaboration,” explains David Hiscoe, director of communications strategy for the NCSU Libraries.
Article continues at link.
NCSU's photo and video collection here.
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