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Hale Library Blog

Month: March 2019

Tearing down the walls

Posted on by Sarah McGreer Hoyt

Demolition and construction are in full swing in Hale Library!

When we visited on Monday, March 26, more than 60 workers swarmed through the building.

On the first floor, they were stripping out drywall and tearing down walls in preparation for the creation of the Dave & Ellie Everitt Learning Commons, opening Fall 2019.

One feature of the Learning Commons? Improved access! If you’ve visited Hale Library, you know it has two exterior entrances: One at the end of a long ramp that originates at the southwest corner and one at the opposite end of the building near Mid-Campus Drive. The latter is called the sunflower entrance because of the wrought-iron sunflower sculpture above its doors.

Previously, when a visitor used the sunflower entrance, they came inside and encountered a wall of windows that blocked their access to the first floor. Instead, they had to climb the stairs or take an elevator to the second floor in order to enter through the main gates. Another trip down the stairs or the elevator was required to get back down to the first floor.

Unsurprisingly, this configuration baffled Hale Library’s visitors and first-time users (and frankly, even K-Staters who have been around for awhile).

Associate Dean Mike Haddock takes a swing at the wall that separated the sunflower entrance from the first floor.

But no more! This week, the wall came down. When Hale Library’s first floor reopens in fall 2019, visitors will walk through the sunflower entrance directly into the Dave & Ellie Everitt Learning Commons on Hale Library’s first floor.

That’s one small step for Associate Dean Haddock, one giant leap for future visitors to the Dave & Ellie Everitt Learning Commons! Haddock enters the first floor through the opening created during demolition.

Progress!

Meanwhile, on the third floor, workers are installing new duct work in the Great Room ceiling.

The new duct work will improve ventilation and heating and cooling throughout the oldest parts of the building. 
Workers wrap insulation around new duct work in the Great Room.
A crew removes debris in the attic space immediately south of the Great Room, just above the Academic Learning Center.

Outside, on the north side of the building, scaffolding is going up in preparation for an imminent roofing project.

A crane is parked nearby on the south edge of the quad. It is maneuvering steel beams from the roof into a space above the fourth floor Academic Learning Center where the fire started.

The north side of Historic Farrell Library (the 1927 section of the Hale Library building).
The crane extends over Historic Farrell Library’s roof and moves the beams through a gap in the penthouse wall, which is below and to the right of the crane’s lifting hook.

Since the crane operator on the ground can’t see over the building, the workers rely on communication via wireless radio to complete every step of the process.

A worker on Hale Library’s roof guides a steel beam into the penthouse and onto a winch system in the ceiling that moves the beam into place. 
Two steelworkers position the beam. Most of the walls are black from years of roofing tar, but in this photo, the wall behind the worker in the florescent yellow shirt was also blackened by the fire.  
Associate Deans Sheila Yeh and Mike Haddock look on. 

From the outside, Hale Library appears quiet and empty. On the inside, it’s a different scene entirely. We look forward to bringing you more construction updates in the coming weeks.

Two workers clean debris from the attic space adjacent to the Great Room.

The Hobrock Award Nominees

Posted on by Sarah McGreer Hoyt

Award season continues! If they created an all-team Big 12 librarian category, these would be our contenders: They’ve all been nominated for the Brice G. Hobrock Distinguished Faculty Award.

The Hobrock Award was established by the Friends of K-State Libraries to honor Dean Emeritus Hobrock upon his retirement in 2004. Annually, the award recognizes outstanding librarianship and superior accomplishments among the K-State Libraries faculty.

Nominees are evaluated based on their professional activities during the last two years. One recipient is honored with a plaque of recognition and an award of $1,000.

Jo Crawford was nominated for her dedication to securing the best possible journal prices in the face of increasingly difficult economic conditions.

Collection development librarians oversee purchases and subscriptions, deaccession underused materials and make other strategic decisions regarding how the Libraries spends their acquisitions dollars.

Jo, who currently focuses on science materials, has worked in this challenging field since 2011. The Libraries currently spend about $5 million each year on subscriptions to electronic databases and journals. However, publishers have been raising their prices for years.

Jo’s nominator noted that she has been a dedicated employee, working long hours in Hale Library to find the best prices possible in order to get the materials our researchers need, even in the face of inexorable subscription increases.

Casey Hoeve, associate professor, was nominated for outstanding scholarship and leadership.

Like other K-State faculty members, our librarians conduct research, write journal articles and books, and present and lead committees for professional associations in their field of study.

Casey’s nominator said, “Casey has worked very hard … as co-chair of the Libraries, Archives, & Museums area for the Popular Culture Association … . He attends area chairs meetings, chairs all panels (often 8-10 panels per conference) … reviews paper proposals and handles a multitude of questions that come to the area chairs prior to a conference. Additionally, he has presented at the conference and his papers are exceptional.”

And finally, they noted the excellent work Casey has done as a collection development librarian for the arts and humanities in a challenging economic environment: “[H]e has worked diligently over the past two years to work with academic departments as K-State Libraries has continued to cancel serials due to ongoing budget constraints.”

Char Simser, professor, was nominated for professional excellence and patient mentorship.

Char, coordinator of electronic publishing, works hand-in-hand with the editors who create their online scholarly journals through K-State Libraries’ online open access publisher, New Prairie Press. There is a significant amount of setup work associated with creating a new journal, and Char has helped dozens of organizations navigate that process.

In the fall of 2017, the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) sought to publish a new journal, NACADA REVIEW, with New Prairie Press. Char’s nominator from NACADA said, “Char has been with us every step of the way.”

“Char’s expertise is invaluable as our editors … [prepare] for the inaugural issue. For Char, no question is too ‘dumb.’ Her explanations are straight forward, her patience boundless, her advice golden. In short, this journal would not exist without Char’s expertise. … [she] is truly an excellent resource and colleague for K-State faculty, and takes the mission of the open access community to heart.”

Ellen Urton, associate professor, was nominated for outstanding contributions in support of faculty teaching.

Not all students come to K-State prepared to conduct college-level research. Academic librarians address that challenge by teaching research skills in classrooms across campus. In fact, K-State’s librarians often collaborate with other faculty members and become co-teachers or research partners.

Ellen Urton is a devoted teaching partner. She has long supported the Landscape Architecture and Regional and Community Planning (LARCP) program through hands-on instruction. However, according to her nominator, “she eclipsed all of her past efforts through her recent collaboration on LAR101 ‘Introduction to Landscape Architecture.’”

Ellen collaborated with an LARCP professor and graduate student to develop a course from scratch: “Ellen’s vast expertise of resources, learning models and concrete teaching methods complimented her creativity for course structure and content development,” her nominator said. “Once the semester began, Ellen helped students directly by providing feedback on their work … . I can state with absolute certainty that [their] was significantly enriched by Ellen’s diligent contributions.”

The winners will be announced at the All-Staff Recognition Ceremony on  Wednesday, March 27. Congratulations to the nominees!

 

Destruction, demolition and new construction

Posted on by Sarah McGreer Hoyt

Sometimes, you have to strip away the old before you can build the new. That’s our theme this week, as we bring you dramatic photos of the latest demolition and construction in Hale Library.

A map illustrates 10 of K-State's university buildings. with Hale Library located at the center. A small red mark is at Hale's upper left corner.

To help give you a sense of the site of our first photos, the jagged red spot above marks the location of the fire.

Two peaked plywood roofs stand about four feet high in the foreground. An attic-like space is situated on a ledge above and behind them.

Today, if you enter Historic Farrell Library’s third floor and stand on the false floor built on top of the scaffolding that fills the Great Room, like Associate Dean Mike Haddock did recently, you can see that spot.

The Great Room murals are covered by the plywood boxes with peaked roofs, which you see in the photo above. The attic space where the fire burned is directly above and behind them. In an attic-like space, a charred wall is at the right. The floor is missing except for some support beams, so you can see through to the room below.

Up close, you can see that the debris has been cleared away. Through the holes in the attic floor you look down into the Academic Learning Center (ALC) where the student athletes met for study tables. ALC staff members were the ones who first smelled the smoke, even before the fire alarms went off.

While the charred walls are a clear mark of the destruction, this also serves to illustrate that the actual fire was contained to one location. The vast majority of the damage was from smoke and water.

But enough destruction for today’s post.

How about some demolition? In Hale Library as we knew it, there were a lot of stairwells–many of them in tucked-away corners of the building that weren’t highly trafficked. They took up prime real estate, so in our renovation, we’re reclaiming the stairway highlighted in purple above.

A pile of rubble sits at the base of a metal staircase.

Before we can renovate, though, it has to be demolished. It might not look very innovative right now, but workers have jack-hammered away concrete to clear away space for the Innovation Center on Hale Library’s first and second floors.At the left, a worker in a blue hardhat stands on a staircase. A shower of sparks rains down from the next flight of stairs on the right.

After the concrete was hauled out, crews used blowtorches to disassemble the frames of the metal staircases.

A stairwell made of concrete blocks stands nearly empty except for a small piece of metal stairway and a section of red scaffolding.

Here you can see that the demolition has cleared out the stairs between third and fourth floor. As of today, that entire stairwell has been emptied. Progress!

A computer-generated rendering shows a dozen students scattered around a large room that features tables and chairs of different styles, computer screens, white boards, and a tool board hung with tools in a makerspace setting.
In the Innovation Center, users will generate virtual reality experiences through 360-degree video or 3-D animation. They will create artificial intelligence, edit audio and video and learn to use state-of-the-art technology that is not readily available elsewhere on campus.

So, Associate Dean Mike Haddock (who takes 97% of the amazing photos we bring you) is back. The map below shows the northwest corner of the first floor. Mike, as represented by the small purple man, is standing in Historic Farrell Library’s Room 117, and the rectangles highlighted in pink represent shafts (called “chases,” in construction parlance) that extend
through the building from the first floor up to the fourth.

A line drawing of the upper left portion of a floor map. Four small pink rectangles are in a horizontal row across the top third of the map.

This is what Mike sees when he turns and faces east-north-east toward Willard Hall and Mid-Campus Drive. A large, shabby room lined with glass windows with small square panes and columns with ornate plaster moldings.

If he turns to face south, he sees a wall of Room 117 opposite the large bank of windows looks like this:

A very thick, worn wall made of limestone and plaster is different shades of white and beige and has several different-sized rectangular windows and doorways.For most of us, the exciting part of construction comes when you get to look at the shiny, clean end product. We’re not there yet, but there’s really important work going on now so that the new Hale Library’s infrastructure can support all of those shiny, clean new spaces, like the previously mentioned Innovation Center.

Case in point regarding infrastructure: The steel beam over the doorway in the photo above is new reinforcement.

A rough limestone wall is at right. Two narrow rectangular-shaped holes are cut in the floor in front of the wall. Dust and stone debris coats the rest of the floor.If we were to walk through that doorway, you’d find the chases that are highlighted in pink on the floor plan above. On second, third and fourth floors, guardrails have been built around those chases for safety, since they’re essentially like an open elevator shaft.

A room with a lot of exposed metal wall framing is filled with give large rectangular metal pieces of ductwork wrapped in metallic silver insulation.

Over the last month, workers have been installing ductwork wrapped in insulation into those chases. The ductwork runs through the building from top to bottom.

A length of metallic silver insulation-wrapped rectangular ductwork is installed in one of the chases in front of the limestone wall.

This is just some of the construction work on Hale Library’s infrastructure. With improvements like these in place, the building will have improved air quality and more efficient heating and cooling.

A worn limestone and plaster wall in shades of off-white and white is punctuated by several rectangular windows and door. Several of those spaces are now blocked by the air vents wrapped in metallic silver ductwork.

Progress is happening. It’s not shiny and clean, but it’s important work that will take us one step forward to our new Hale Library.

As always, if you have questions about the process, please comment on the blog post or contact us at libcomm@ksu.edu!

To all of our student and faculty readers, happy spring break! We won’t be posting next week, but we’ll be back on March 19.