Read more about the second project in the LRC renovation in the Brown Bulletin or the Steadfast Faith Campaign website.
Construction is scheduled to begin after graduation in May 2025, so the library will operate normally during this school year. Library staff will begin identifying and packing up rarely-used books for storage.
They've been moved to the shelves on the other side of the floor near the windows.
Most of our backfile periodicals (print journals and magazines more than a year old) have been removed from our collection and donated to the Internet Archive for their long-term preservation and digitization project. A few periodicals that we kept are now shelved near the south edge of the middle section of shelves on the second floor.
Our backfile periodicals were rarely used by students, so the space for storing them could be put to better use as study space or storage for more academically relevant resources. The proliferation of digital resources allows us to provide a much larger collection in a smaller footprint than in previous generations.
The library area of the LRC will become a one-stop academic success center, with offices for tutoring, the writing center, student support services, and other programs on the first floor and library services consolidated on the second floor. The new library will span the full width of the building, with a new reading room overlooking the quad and study spaces extending into the new bridgeway running north to Chapman Hall. An overflow book storage area in the old media lab space will keep rarely-used books accessible while freeing up room in the public library area for student use. See the links in the box above for more details about the plan.
Library services will be provided out of the new bridgeway between Chapman and LRC during the renovation, with a streamlined book collection held in closed stacks in a book vault in the old media lab. Infrequently used books will be stored at an offsite warehouse during the renovation and returned to the library in 2026.
Reference and Reserve books will be available on demand in the bridgeway; other books will be retrieved from the book vault by request. You will be able to submit book requests online and come pick them up in the bridgeway at your convenience. You will also, of course, be able to access thousands of ebooks online at any time of day or night through the library website.
The books in offsite storage will be inaccessible and will not appear in the library catalog during the renovation. We are taking care to ensure that only infrequently used books are placed in offsite storage, so you should be able to complete most of your assignments with the books that are still available onsite or as ebooks. At the same time, the library will offer expanded interlibrary loan service, as well as access to ArkLink cards that you can use at other academic libraries in the area, to make sure that you can get any books you need.