Library renovations to add more study space

A series of planned renovations will add more than 20,000 square feet of study and work space to Boatwright Memorial Library, library officials said.

The renovations will attempt to separate quiet and collaborative study areas more logically and increase the amount of work space in the library, said Kevin Butterfield, the director of bibliographic and digital services and interim university librarian.

The major phase of the plan is to remove all of the shelving from the large rooms farthest from the main doors on the first and second floors and open up that space for individual and group study areas, Butterfield said. Librarians will move these materials to new, compact shelving on basement floor two where the collaborative area on that floor is now.

The staff hopes to designate the first floor as a group study area where talking and other noise would be acceptable. The second floor will be aimed at quiet study, with a new location for the silent study room. The current silent room will be converted into offices for technology services at the library, Butterfield said.

"We wanted to arrange the areas so that [different standards of quietness] were not butting up against each other," Butterfield said. "We don't want the sound bleeding from one area to another."

The project will add 20,149 square feet of space, including seven new group study rooms and six single study rooms. The Academic Skills Center and the Writing Center will also be given outposts in the library to give tutors space to work with students, Butterfield said.

"I see the new levels as a more creative space, where connections and collisions are happening," Butterfield said, "not just a place where we store a lot of books."

Junior Elliot Fox said he liked the plan. "We just generally need more space in the library, so this seems like a good way to do it."

The plan also calls for the staircase leading to the Technology Learning Center on the second floor to be made wider and more visible so that area will be more accessible, Butterfield said.

Junior Lauren Zelek said she approved of this change because she thought that the TLC was "a great resource for us to have, but people don't even know where it is sometimes."

Basement floor one will be largely unaffected by any of the renovations.

Butterfield and Lucretia McCulley, the director of outreach services for the library, said that talks about this round of renovations had been in the works for several years. They said they had constantly surveyed students to find out what they liked or disliked about the library.

They received some help from anthropology professor Jan French's ethnographic methods class, which studied the usage of the library for their class project by visiting different areas at different times and talking to the students about how they used the space.

French said that the class had then presented its findings to 40 school administrators at the end of the semester.

"Their study confirmed what we had seen already, as far as collaborative space [and other areas]," Butterfield said.

McCulley said that the library staff had tried to adapt to changes in the studying and social environment and that this philosophy had guided their renovations.

The library also has a multi-million dollar project in the master plan that would call for an additional entrance to the library from the Jepson Quadrangle and an overall addition of square footage to the library.

The project is likely to be started no earlier than 2014, Butterfield said.

McCulley, who has worked at the library for 25 years, said the last major renovation project had been completed in 2006 and had brought the library to its current state. That renovation added the compact shelving, which freed up space on basement levels one and two, and updated the wiring and other areas to address the need for newer technology, she said.

Contact reporter Casey Glick at casey.glick@richmond.edu