Section II:
ASSURING A STUDENT ORIENTED CAMPUS



  The Once & Future Library

http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/Renovation/libren.htm

"The new building for the students proves that this is a student oriented campus. Every modern amenity (except collections) is available to students. It is a pleasure to work in these surroundings." Susan Vaughn, Associate Librarian for Collection Development

  • Preparing for the Move

    "While it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a great staff to move and establish a new Library!" Miriam Deutch, Associate Librarian for Research & Access Services

    "Although we will miss (surprise!) Roosevelt for a variety of reasons—the unifying sense of being exiled but not defeated, and getting to know new Brooklyn College staff and faculty—we will not miss the jinxed elevator, the plastic wrapped windows, the out-of-control climate control, and the incessant blizzard-like sound of the overhead blowers." Sally Bowdoin, Head of Serials

    In the spring 2002 we began to use a variety of tools to prepare the College community for our move into the new Library. We invited all the Library and Technology Representatives, plus the department chairs, for lunch with the Library management team and Library Project manager Marla Appelbaum. Here, we answered their questions about the new Library and the move. After lunch, we gave them a tour of the new building. Attendees were given a choice of any one of four dates in March and April, so that everyone's schedule could be accommodated.

    Many, many more tours were organized and offered during the spring semester 2002, stirring interest in the new building and easing anxieties about the upcoming move. President Kimmich toured the new Library regularly, and on April 19 we took him, Vice-President Steve Little, and former Vice-President Patricia Hassett through the site. We were tired but happy when the term ended and the demand for tours lessened: by June 1 the building had become such a beehive of activity that tours were very difficult to conduct.

    In May 2002 this letter was sent to all faculty:

    This memorandum contains important information about Library and AIT services during the spring 2002 semester.

    1) The new Library is slated for completion in the late spring, 2002.

    2) Throughout the spring semester 2002, the Library and Academic Information Technologies will continue to deliver service from our current locations in Roosevelt Hall and the Field Library.

    3) The gradual move of the collections to the new building will begin on the first of April with the materials shelved off-site at LaGuardia Community College (the bulk of the Archives, and pre-1980 bound journals, government publications, and microforms).

    Please consider these important factors as you plan for the spring 2002 semester:
    A) Once a volume is moved to the new building, it may no longer be available for use until the Library reopens in its new quarters.

    B) For this reason, if there are books or journal articles to which your students must have access in the spring 2002, seriously consider placing these materials on reserve. To arrange to put materials on reserve, contact Barbara Allier reserves@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

    C) Encourage your students to begin their research and writing projects early in the semester, when the maximum number of print resources are easily available to them.

    D) Faculty and students now have access to quantities of electronic resources that enable them to meet their research and instructional needs. These resources are unaffected by the move.

  • Presently, the Library licenses more than 10,000 full-text electronic journals and reference resources, covering every conceivable subject area. These are accessible from our Web site http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/electronic_resources/index.html.

  • The Library's collection of electronic books (all published by well-known scholarly presses) exceeds 8,000 and covers a broad range of disciplines. These titles are available at http://www.netlibrary.com/.

  • These substantial electronic holdings are available not only from all campus locations offering Internet access (including the Roosevelt and Field Libraries, as well as the Library Café) but also from remote locations (your home, or the homes of your students).

  • To arrange off-campus access to the Library's e-collections, go to http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/electronic_resources/facproxy.htm (faculty) or http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/electronic_resources/stuproxy.htm (students) and follow the simple directions found there.

  • Please encourage your students to take advantage of this important benefit of being enrolled at Brooklyn College. (At the present, Brooklyn is the only campus in CUNY to offer students remote access to all its e-resources.)

    • E) Should you have any questions about the Library's electronic resources, or arranging for remote access for yourself or your students, please contact your department's bibliographer.
  • If you are unsure who your bibliographer is, contact Professor Susan Vaughn vaughn@brooklyn.cuny.edu>

  • If you experience any difficulty configuring your browser for remote access, contact Professor Beth Evans bevans@brooklyn.cuny or Professor Mariana Regalado regalado@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

  • If there are any questions I can answer for you, or if you require any further assistance, please contact me at x5342 or barbrah@brooklyn.cunyledu.

    • The planning activities that surrounded the move were endless. The Library and AIT staff amazed the entire campus (including themselves!) with their seemingly limitless capacity for work. These activities included:

  • Designing a method for reserving meeting spaces and group study rooms in the new Library
  • Producing hundreds of range end and drawer labels, plus maps of the collections to assist readers in locating materials
  • Choosing a digital multimedia distribution system
  • Planning celebratory events for the new Library (with members of the Executive Committee and Institutional Advancement)
  • Producing a brochure that introduces the new building (with members of the Executive Committee and Publications)
  • Developing a cleaning and maintenance plan (with Facilities)
  • Refining the security plan (with Safety and Security)
  • Completing the online Library directory and map system and the computer-based room and PC scheduling system
  • Reviewing and updating all Library and Academic IT access policies, including those for space, collections, and equipment
  • Familiarizing staff and security officers with the new building so that they can answer readers'
    directional questions
  • Developing specifications for the signs in the new building for whose creation staff will be responsible
  • Developing specifications for internal Library publications (fonts, logo)
  • Planning food and drink policies (for readers and Library/AIT staff)

  • Planning for the Move: One Unit's Story
    On a lovely day in April, 2002, Slava Polishchuk, Edythe Rosenblatt, Marianne LaBatto and Laura Maltz first traveled to LaGuardia Community College in Queens to begin color-coding thousands of boxes of archival materials, preparing them for the move back to the Once and Future Library. These pilgrimages would continue throughout the month of May.

    The warehouse at LaGuardia was filthy, but the staff persevered through the dust, dead pigeons, and other unmentionables in the vicinity of the collections. Many of the boxes were out of order and staff spent days in a "treasure hunt," attempting to find and label the boxes in sequence.

    On a second front, throughout the summer staff were busily packing the items in the Field Library and monitoring American Interfile as they placed materials in the core stacks of the new building. Edythe Rosenblatt and Slava Polishchuk spent many hours in the hot and dusty new building (whose HVAC system had yet to be powered up), ensuring that our collections were properly placed on the shelves. Because Special Collections' materials came from two and sometimes three locations, unpacking and interfiling seemed interminable. Work-study students were invaluable. On many occasions, we considered moving collections out of the new building, because of the exaggerated accumulation of heat.

    Then on August 28 we opened for business--with the moving and unpacking process only partially completed. The big shock hit with incredible speed: Special Collections' prominent first-floor location in the new building increased traffic dramatically, slowing the behind-the-scenes work of unpacking: never had the unit experienced so many patrons. Foot traffic grew tenfold, as did phone and Internet requests. The old real estate adage "location, location, location" was proven, in spades.

    The word quickly went out that the Archives was back in business. In this unit, each reader who enters requires individual attention. Sometimes he or she is seeking a book from the Hess Collection, or a volume from our Brooklyniana Collection, and the request can be handled fairly quickly. At other times, a student needs to review an entire archival collection and staff can spend up to an hour finding it, transporting it, and giving the reader the requisite boxes. Just as the use of archival collections is time consuming, pulling items from a collection is a slow and careful process for the staff. In the meantime, the back-office work related to the move continues: hundreds of archival box labels were damaged during the move and must be replaced.

  • The Move Begins!
    "Packing up after three years was a liberating experience, to say the least. Boxes of ‘stuff' that we had hauled over from the old Library--metal book ends; old phones; brittle and yellowed computer paper; OCLC manuals from the early 80s; EBSCO invoices from Day 1; and the 1,000 pound Kardex (which was replaced by five small but sturdy Staples card files)--were thankfully left behind." Sally Bowdoin, Head of Serials

    For the Library proper, the book move began in May 2002. A button on the Library's Web site http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/library/librarymove.htm took readers directly to a status page updated at least once a week, on Mondays. By June, everything housed off-site at LaGuardia Community College had been relocated to the new building, and the mover American Interfile had begun to move the circulating collections from the Field Library. The move continued throughout the summer, as bound volumes, microforms, sound recordings and other media streamed, and at times trickled, into the new building. Interfiling materials that had been housed in several locations was a major task: when we moved to temporary quarters, collections were pulled apart and shelved according to their publication dates; now they had to be reassembled in the correct order. The collection move was completed by late September.

    From June until September, Library staff worked many hours, often in intense heat in a building whose AC system had yet to be activated, closely supervising the shelving of materials, ensuring that the movers put each book, shelf by shelf, in the correct place. This care was thought necessary because of our disastrous experiences with the 1999 move into temporary quarters when materials were shelved willy-nilly and the entire collection had to be shelfread, post-move (a costly proposition). American Interfile's low-skilled and low-paid workers were simply not up to such a complex job.

    Once the books were moved, they were immediately shrink-wrapped: the building was still very much a construction site, with everything in it susceptible to dust and other particles floating in the air. Shelvers began producing the call number signs to be posted on every range end–miraculously, the massive number of signs were in place by the end of September!

    An event illustrative of unexpected delays in the move was the gradual accumulation of heat in the old LaGuardia core stacks, home to the archives. At more than 100 degrees, the heat was seriously dangerous to our fragile collections. The three options identified were 1) remove the collections (delaying the move); 2) activate the central air in the new building; 3) bring in portable AC units. Eventually, Turner was able to secure portable AC units.

    By September 1, the move was complete.

  • August 28: We Did It!

    It was understood that we would open the new Library using temporary keys, temporary railings, and any number of other temporary items--and with workmen dancing all about us and our readers. However, there were two critical keys to opening for business in the Once and Future Library.

    First, the city required a temporary certificate of occupancy (TCO) which meant working fire-alarm, sprinkler, and mechanical systems; operable elevators; doors and door hardware; lighting and electrical power; floor and wall finishes. Turner Construction, our construction management firm, worked madly to meet these goals. The second issue was connectivity– both computers (without which there would be no access to the Library catalog) and telephones. And, once connectivity was physically achieved, AIT staff had to bring equipment into the building and actually install it.

    Nonetheless, by the skin of our teeth and displaying considerable heroics, we opened as scheduled on August 28. The TCO materialized, and a minimum level of connectivity (a handful of working phones and PCs) was achieved. Tours of the new building (designed and scripted with the help of a small committee by reference librarian and subject specialist Jocelyn Berger-Barrera) were offered every hour of every day during September and October. This was an enormous task given the size of the structure and complexity of the building, and almost 200 tours were offered from August 29th to October 31st; hundreds of visitors and student groups participated.

    Joe Logiurato of the Publications Office designed handsome Library name badges so that readers can readily identify staff members and obtain assistance. In the spring 2003 canvas bags bearing the new Library logo (also designed by Joe) went on sale at the Circulation desk for $3 each. This is a bit less than their actual cost, but we wanted something students would find affordable. New stationery and business cards bearing the Library logo have also been ordered.