Facilities plan prioritization flows into the 5-year capitalization plans which are based on space inventories which include basic fundamental assessments of

What you have

What you need

to support the campus master plan.

Don’t be put off by the 75% level of coded type of space for 4xx libraries.

The reality of today’s library/learning resource center is easily represented with space, which performs a multiplicity of uses and includes a wide variety of coding per regulations. Meeting rooms, community space, AV, Data processing to name a few. This activity is in effect a boon to your efforts as it paints a truer picture of what exactly is happening in a library today and this raises the value/ cost allowable as well as the square footage of space.

3) Library Technology Plan:

The Library Technology plan should include the Library mission Statement and it should ideally be a validated part of the Campus Technology Plan.

Institutional Strategic Planning activities have a certain formulaic process that includes an "environmental scan" and a "future scan" leading to plans for fulfilling the mission and serving the broader community.

Similar planing activities should be taking place within the work teams in any library planning a building. Drop the jargon of strategic planning but sit down with quality time devoted to answering the following questions:

1. What are our critical services in … Circulation, Reference, AV, Tech Services etc.
2. What are the driving forces for your campus as a whole? Rapid technological change, increasing diversity, transfer education, workforce training?
3. What are the major changes in the information world at large?
4. How does this translate into delivery of our traditional and new library services?

Example:

If this quote is part of your environmental scan data, how will it translate into the day to day services of the various departments in the library? How will you merge thinking about continuity of service with the introduction of new services and new thinking about services? How does this "reality" translate into the long-range strategic plan for Circulation/Reserves in terms of priorities and timeframes, goals and objectives for the long term, the medium term or even for immediate action?

How will it affect the design of the new space?

Trust the librarians and staff who are currently devoted to delivering services in the library. Chances are they have already adapted to many changes in the past and will be open to changes in the future. The difference here is that the change is not on your desk, ready for a plan of implementation tomorrow. The changes are projected for the next few years and will take place in many cases all at once on day one when the new building is opened. This can be either a great opportunity or a great source of stress. Sometimes both.

This is not just a theoretical academic exercise. The building plan and the floor plan and the furniture and equipment plan must be solidly grounded on the functions and services to be performed in that building.

You may not find anything out there you want to model. But, seeing the other libraries forces critical thinking activities that challenge and support the various elements of your plan. Try to visit another library at a busy time. The dynamics of a building are very different at peak usage time than they are at a quiet period during a vacation. Take lots of pictures.

• disabled students
• student senate
• faculty senate
• Flex week Q & A for everyone

Every building project has a team working from day one to represent the owner (the college) and a team representing the builder. Usually the occupant of the building is consulted when the project manager sees a need. I recommend that the library director, who has intimate knowledge of the dynamic nature of what will be delivered in this particular building, be a part of the weekly walk-through process. Your attendance will be boring much of the time but overall your presence will guarantee knowledgeable considerations based on WHAT WILL BE GOING ON IN THE FINISHED BUILDING whenever changes and adaptations are contemplated.

Shop for piggyback contracts with other school districts, state and federal contracts. Avoid going to bid and seek the best prices for quality materials.

Work with the designer and the vendors to assure the broadest range of cost effective choices. If the new library will have a heavy component of online campuswide use, you may have to include the costs of an additional T1 line and switches and servers for Computing Resources to manage the anticipated load.

Encourage librarians and staff to re-evaluate and re-think service delivery on a continuous basis. Walls cannot be changed after a certain point, and furniture cannot be re-arranged after a certain point. But, there is less likelihood of any dramatic discoveries if the plan and implementation stays in the forefront of everyday work.

Take digital pictures of the work site and allow everyone to get inside the construction area.

Use teams to work with consultants. Designers worked together to build a color board for the library. Staff teams had some choices with respect to final layout of personal office spaces. Staff teams had a major role in analyzing proposed work areas for their functionality.

At Cabrillo we really accelerated all of the above activities. The gap between funding/approval of the building and ground breaking was 6 years. Those were six years in which our profession and the patterns for delivering services were transformed by the growth of the Internet and switch from CD to online sources. When ground breaking and construction activity started we went into high gear.

1. Wrote four different mini educational master plans.

• Library Instruction
• Collection Development / Reference Services
• Systems management and Technical Services
• Library Administration and General Services Plan

The organization of these plans is not important. What is important is that the various work groups grappled with changes and delivery goals and the floor plan. Very invigorating. We established teams whose problem solving efforts crossed traditional departmental lines within the library.

1. We began to make the visits to newer or recently remodeled libraries.
2. It became readily apparent we were not going to have stack space equal to growth which would match the ACRL standard. We changed our goals and began to talk about a lean, but current collection which could support the programs at a community college if augmented by a robust selection of online fulltext materials.
3. We acknowledged which services we planned to discontinue in the new building and made plans for a new growth area: delivering Computer Aided Instruction modules at 16 separate workstations in the library.
4. We hired an interior designer to work with everyone who would occupy a space in the Library and the Learning Centers. He completed floorplans and layout designs. Staff became comfortable with the cutouts and with playing with the areas to predict workflow and peopleflow.
5. Gathered the prices and presented options to participants which would revise the spending so that the furniture would be functional and attractive but cost effective thus freeing money for the unanticipated technological needs.
6. Made the decision to have an HP5si network printer placed behind the Circulation desk for all printing from workstations in the building. Circulation staff were confident that the paging of current periodical issues would virtually cease when fulltext magazine databases were introduced. This has been the case and the workload is roughly equivalent.
7. Sought and found piggyback contracts for the chosen furniture. Used a Federal GSA contract for the shelving.
8. Set up focus groups of students from DS&PS. There were many important decisions made based on ADA and on the sudden advent of Assistive Technologies supported by the De Anza High Tech Center. The aisles in public spaces in the library far exceed ADA minimums. Students at the focus group requested that the space to either side of a wheelchair be adequate for them to retrieve their own books when they were next to the wheelchair. They also indicated a desire for 31" height surfaces to be scattered throughout the library. Students with the newer, compact wheelchairs need the adjustable surface of an anthro cart.
9. We came to the realization that a Reference area with over 40 workstations was NOT going to be a quiet space. Quiet study areas are provided deep in the book stacks and beyond as well as separate collaborative group study rooms and larger quiet study rooms far from the Reference area. We spread out the stacks so that the non-book aisles were wide enough for a row of (now very popular) carrels.
10. From the perspective of preparing for systems management in the new library we took the following steps. Purchased prototype workstations, servers, security and Ghost software and began to set up and test the library classroom and public workstation images and security configurations four months prior to installation in the new building. Infrastructure prototypes prior to deployment during the chaos of installation was one of the most valuable things we did. We also had prototype built of our new and still in use Homepage. We combined the move with bringing up our single Homepage interface to the CD Tower, the Innovative system, Online fulltext, and the information about our library, services and collections.
11. Advanced the goals in the library's Master Plans by campaigning for resources so that the potential of the new building to add value to the instructional goals of the college would be realized. Cabrillo has added two full time contract faculty positions in the past two years. One position is devoted to information literacy activities and one is a fulltime Reference librarian to provide consistency and continuity at the Reference Desk. The library has secured a stable budget for resource purchases from an annual 15% allocation of Instructional Equipment and Library Materials funds.
12. Student senate support for extending library hours has led to funding for increased hours throughout the semester and further extension for the two-three weeks prior to finals

1. I began attending the weekly walk through meetings the first week I was on campus. We rejected the carpet submission, which had previously been accepted. We converted the steel studs to a higher strength. I agreed to give up a shower stall in the library (don’t ask me why that was there in the first place) I took pictures and shared them from our web page with the campus as a whole.
2. We did a rapid reality check of such details as the building's electrical and data wiring plan. A very expensive but absolutely necessary Stop Work Order ensued as the plans were redone within the context of today’s technological capabilities and the context of electronic online information delivery. We have data and electrical outlets virtually everywhere. (When the second floor of the library was used for career night, any table that wanted a data hookup could have it from the nearby floor box.)
3. Converted an inadequate classroom space into an extremely functional electronic classroom with 24 stations, which are in 48" low carrels with enough room to allow for doubling when necessary.

It has been two years since we opened. We have expanded our fulltext and online offerings. We have doubled our non-print holdings of Videos in support of instruction. We have a wide variety of Computer Aided Instruction software delivered for students to use in the library. They range from Dental Hygiene to Topographic maps for Geography.

The only down side is that the HVAC system is occasionally possessed and that is comforting in a way because that’s a truth for every library I have ever worked in or visited. No matter how unique you may feel your building experience is, the HVAC will be proposed for exorcism within the first year.