After dealing with space issues for books in E.S. Bird Library, officials are now in the planning stages of building a facility on South Campus to house the surplus of books, one of several updates happening at the library.

The library does not have enough space to effectively store materials in the campus library, said Pamela McLaughlin, director of communications and external relations at the library. Shelving is also being added to the fourth floor of Bird to house thousands of books, and six team rooms have opened on the third and fourth floors.

McLaughlin said there are materials in the library that have never been used or have not been checked out for a long time. But because the library is a research library, officials do not want to get rid of the books permanently and instead will move them to the facility on South Campus to alleviate some of the shelving issues, she said.

Library officials hope to finalize plans for the South Campus shelving facility by the end of this semester, McLaughlin said. The moved books would still be listed in the online catalog but would be flagged as located at the South Campus facility. Students, faculty and staff would then be able to make an online request for a delivery of the book from the South Campus facility to Bird, McLaughlin said.

‘People feel very strongly that we need to keep these materials as close at hand as possible,’ McLaughlin said.

Team rooms in the library, equipped with LCD screens, desktop PCs and media panel controls, opened Feb. 7, McLaughlin said. The rooms can be used for presentation practice, Web conferencing and other group projects. Additional technology, such as webcams, microphones and cables to connect laptops, are provided in the rooms upon request.

The team rooms are available to students, faculty and staff who make reservations 24 hours in advance, McLaughlin said. But those without a reservation can also sign out a key for nonreserved rooms on a first-come, first-served basis, McLaughlin said.

Checkout periods last for three hours, with one renewal, depending on the availability of the room. Room availability ends one hour before the third and fourth floors close so staff members can close properly, McLaughlin said. Those floors close at midnight from Sundays through Thursdays and at 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

There is a $30 fee for lost keys and a 25-cent-per-minute fine for the late return of keys, McLaughlin said. Users of the team rooms are responsible for all damages, losses and vandalism, she said, and they will be subject to fines for any damage.

The library has a few more spring semester projects, including installing more computers on the second floor near the current periodicals and upgrading the remaining elevators in the building, McLaughlin said.

The library will also continue to make room to house thousands of additional books on the fourth and fifth floors by moving 12 tables and seating down to the lower levels, McLaughlin said.

In place of the tables and seating, 28 rows of shelving are being added to the fourth floor to house about 47,000 books. An additional 25,000 books have already been moved to the fifth floor, which is completely finished with the book-moving process, she said.

In April, library shelves in Bird were at 98 percent capacity, while recommendations for shelving capacity were at 75 to 80 percent, according to an April 22 article published in The Daily Orange.

The staff is about a quarter of the way done with moving books to the fourth floor, McLaughlin said. The moving process has been ongoing since the summer, but it takes a long time to reorganize the materials on the shelves, she said.

‘The process takes a while to do, actually. We have to reorganize all the materials on the shelves, and we have to handle every single book to do that,’ McLaughlin said. ‘It’s a complicated process, and you don’t want to lose things.’

Elsewhere in the library, renovations remain halted. Renovations in the lower level of the library were put on hold in fall 2009 when carcinogens called polychlorinated biphenyls were found in the carpeting. Syracuse University Risk Management and the Environmental Health Office tested the extent of the PCB in September 2010, according to a Sept. 30 article published in The Daily Orange. McLaughlin said renovations have not moved forward since that time.

‘We don’t know anything else,’ she said. ‘Everything is still on hold.’

medelane@syr.edu

 

Published on February 14, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Meghin: medelane@syr.edu | @meghinwithani