The architectural firm, HBM based in Cleveland, offered an updated view of the Library showing a draft of the layout they expect to implement. We are still in the design phase and have not selected furniture so the final plan may differ from that which is presented here.
Reviewing pictures of the Harrell Health Sciences Library offers perspective on the changes that academic libraries have undergone. In 2001, we had two floors of active stacks and some spillover storage in the basement area. The ratio of study space to shelf space has changed radically. Now the upstairs stacks area is gone, replaced by the Simulation Center and most of our journals are housed on servers out there somewhere on the Internet.
As “unstacking” continued, journals and texts were removed and the area near the directors office became an open space with tables for group study. Low shelves outside the offices on the left side of the library were replaced with computer pods and carrells and the oversize and coffee table books went to the movable shelves. The last quaint fixture of the paper journals era to go during that renovation was the shelving unit with the little pigeonholes for current print journals.