It’s a familiar lament among community-college librarians: When students have access to Google and Wikipedia (and, at this point, most do), they tend to start acting as if their campus libraries don’t even exist. But a library designed with an eye on the future and a foot in the past can still be a campus focal point, said officials from Sinclair Community College, in Dayton, Ohio.
In a presentation at the League on Innovation’s Conference on Information Technology, Sinclair administrators heralded their own library — which recently reopened after an $8-million overhaul — as “the library of the future.” The building does its best to back up that strong talk: Its features include a commercial printing service, a Starbucks cafe, and, for what it’s worth, a collection of books that remained almost completely intact during the library’s redesign.
Before it was updated, Sinclair’s library — a 1972 model with halls bedecked in the bright-orange carpet typical of its era — was losing visitors every year and suffering from “a whole bunch of underutilized space,” according to Kenneth Moore, Sinclair’s senior vice president for information technology. Champlin/Haupt Architects, the firm in charge of the redesign, solved the library’s space problem by carving out room for private and public study areas, plenty of computer clusters, and a central information desk shared by reference librarians and IT staff.
And to bring back students, Sinclair brought in Starbucks and toyed with the library’s sightlines, attempting to create a more convivial atmosphere in a building that had previously had little use as a social space.
The college has stuck by its collection of books, even as it moved many of its holdings into a much smaller facility while the library was being gutted and rebuilt. But Sinclair jettisoned many of its subscriptions to print journals, replacing them with cheaper electronic alternatives in order to save space. —Brock Read
