ALA! Please share anything new, old, or otherwise!
I learned a ton at ALA since I’m still new (it was my first time attending the annual conference), but I’m sure we all did so it would be great to share. One particularly unexpected tidbit of information I learned was that the University of Chicago is building a new storage facility, and the design is like nothing I’d have thought of for storage. Their news release is online here, but their facility “will be a partially underground facility topped with a glass dome and have the capacity to house 3.5 million volumes of print material — making the University of Chicago the country’s sole top academic research library to keep its entire collection on campus.”
While trying to build underground in Florida is a very bad idea, the idea of a gorgeous reading room for those needing immediate access is really appealing to me in many ways because then the storage facility becomes a storage facility and research hub. Of course, this model is on a specific case with a localized campus environment, but it’s still a beautiful solution even if it isn’t applicable for many others.
What else did others learn that I did or didn’t expect to?
Leave a Reply