Archiving a $109 million library renovation project

We are working on archiving in the Knowledge Bank the digital record of the recently completed three-year, $109 million renovation of the William Oxley Memorial Library at The Ohio State University. In the current mock-up on our development server, the Thompson Library Renovation Project collections include images, reports, meeting minutes, architectural plans and renderings, presentations, and a linked chronology. Here is a sneak peek at the renovation project material: four images of the restoration of the grand reference hall, now named the Cohen Family Grand Reading Room.

Stupendous

"Stupendous". Not a word I see every day. But it was a word used recently by Scott Bennett, a well known library design consultant, to describe The Ohio State University's newly renovated main library, writes Scott Carlson in a Chronicle blog posting.

After all, it wasn't a floppy

When is an anachronism not an anachronism? During the opening minutes of a recent presentation I attended I was struck, negatively, by an image of the first generation Kindle circa 2007 as a representation of today’s library environment.

First impressions 'are everything' but sometimes they may be wrong. I reacted to what I felt was a noticeably dated image of technology.  Of course, the fact that I am still pondering this could have been a subtle and succinct way to get across one of the challenges/opportunities of today’s library environment, but somehow I doubt this was the speaker’s plan. And as I think on this further maybe my initial reaction was misdirected. The speaker, in reality, may have been ahead of the curve and simply chose an image that looked like the Kindle they have been using to read on the plane going on two years now. It is also possible it was not that the speaker used an outdated image, but that the original Kindle, to my mind, is simply not elegant.