Designing a flexible envelope of infrastructure to future proof the
Taylor Family Digital Library
Shawna SadlerTechnology Officer
Taylor Family Digital LibraryUniversity of Calgary
The Flexible Envelope
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Applaud susan Nutter, kristen antelmen, maurice york, gwen
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Introduce myself Outside of our building
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Quick shot of the inside, you can see one of our tour groups in the background So when I was asked to speak at this conference again I scratched my head and thought about what I should say
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A few years ago Tom and I spoke about creating our technology model at the 2011 CNI Spring Membership meeting
Presentation from last DL Benchmarks Technologies I think every library should have Technologies to have to call yourself a Digital Library Where the TFDL has taken it one step further
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So I had to think about what to say to you today I’ve decided to give away one of the the secrets behind the Taylor’s success The secret is in the floor, ceiling and in behind the walls
New Library…
Reno…
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So let’s start from the beginning, the stage many of you are at
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Don’t rush to solutions Step back, open your mind, let all sorts of ideas wash over you. Conduct your environmental scan, see what’s out there. Ideas that resonate with your campus will stick, others will wash away
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As Joan said yesterday, talk to the folks on your campus. Listening to them is the first ingredient to success.
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Find folks on campus who care and want to participate. These are your most valuable assets and are the second ingredient to success. You grab those people and if you’re like Susan Nutter, you hire them and keep them on staff.
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Shape your vision. There will come a point in the planning stage when it’s time to shape your vision. You’ll have to decide if you want to be like Susan Nutter and Tom Hickerson and be bold. It’s a hard road to travel, but from what I’ve seen, both are reaping great rewards and neither campus will be the same again.
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So now you have conducted your envt scan, you understand what your campus wants and needs, you have decided on your vision. Now you’re ready to move forward with Facilities. Listening to Steve Dantzer yesterday, and remembering the early days, I remember know why the early stage of planning is so important, The reality is… You’re going to state your vision repeatedly for five years. You will have to explain it, defend it, re-tell it hundreds of times, everyone in your design team will challenge and try to re-shape it to make their work easier and like Steve said, when the money starts getting tight, the value-engineering stage, your vision will become the core and everything that is not critical to your vision will be questioned and possibly cut. So taking that time in the beginning and formulating the vision is 3rd and most important ingredient to a successful building.
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Mark Valenti is the President of the Sextent Group who was our lead AV Design firm, he’s been through so many of these construction projects. He said something to me that I’ll never forget. “The image you have in your minds eye at the end of your design stage is what will be built. When you walk through the door you will see your vision has come to life, nothing more and nothing less.” We had some incredibly smart and creative people propose some great ideas that went beyond the vision, none of them made it past value engineering. We had some pretty big critics and they tried to chip away at the vision, they were not successful. The vision stood the test of time and we got exactly what we had envisioned at the end of the design phase.
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Most of you here today are ULs and Directors, you all know that Leadership sets the tone to the organization. Re-iterate something Kristen Antelman said in the pre-conference, if your library is going to be technologically aggressive, setting the tone and creating a culture of risk and risk tolerance is critical. It’s the people that make the organization, so make sure you have the right ones and that they’re heading in the right direction. 3rd ingredient to success, your team and all your
It’s hard to CHANGE the library building
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So in past presentations we’ve talked about the Taylor vision and all the cool technologies we have. So today I’m going to focus on one element of our Vision in Calgary, and that element is simply the word change. We’re all too familiar with change Early in our planning phase we talked about the rate of change of information, technologies, how the expectations nd needs of our students change change quickly too. And how it was hard to change the physical space of the library to meet these needs. It’s too hard to change the library
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To change the physical space you have to shut the space down for a long period of time, which has allsorts of implications for service The construction is messy, noisy and really expensive. It’s just a nightmare so we don’t do it as often as we should to keep up with the ever-changing needs of our users.
What’s Next????
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So we asked the Design Team what was out there to build a flexible building, so it was easier to make changes to the physical space
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The came back with raised floor systems
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And demountable walls
It’s going cost more….
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I believe it was 20% increase in group one costs I argued in favour of the raised floor and demountable wall systems, this was our opportunity to pay now with construction funds instead of future library funds. The library space will change, that’s not a choice, our choice is whether to pay for it now or later.
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Now you’ve heard Tom and Steve say that the raised floors have been an issue we’ve had to deal with. But I’d like to clarify that we would choose a different type of raised floor system, designing what went under the floor would be different, but we would still choose a raised floor system.
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I was chatting with Gwen the Interior Designer from Hunt about these floors and it came up in conversation how many times we’ve lifted the floors to make changes since opening the building. I’m guessing we’ve lifted the floors somewhere between 20-30 times to make changes. During construction we had the floors lifted over a hundred times to make changes to installations.
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As Tom mentioned, these floor boxes have not worked out too well for us. I think we should be the host of a design competition to re-design them and hopefully replace them.
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These outlets have been better.
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Other important features for a successful building with technologies… cooling
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Now we’re going to move to the ceiling Flexibility for ceilings today usually means thetre lighting grids, like you’ve seen in Hunt, which are good, but not easy by any means. So I would like to challenge all of our architect and engineering friends to come up with flexible ceilings, libraries need them and we can’t be the only ones
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Flexible walls Power and data still too expensive to make
Lining up furniture and electrical outlets
Adding more furniture electrical outlets
Adding more electrical outlets to respond to reality
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Students wreck stuff, need easy access to fix
Challenge to architects & engineers
How to build a completely flexible building, for real life, not just an intellectual exercise.
Libraries are buildings that will change all the time, great opportunity for architects and engineers to design something really thoughtful and have impact.
