It’s a big week for Hale Library and K-State! On Monday we opened several new spaces including the third and fourth floors and two floors of Historic Farrell Library. This means nearly all of the first through fourth floors are now open to the public.
Despite the recent freezing temperatures and a campus closure on Tuesday due to rolling blackouts, students braved the Kansas tundra on Wednesday to explore the new spaces Hale Library has to offer. Beautiful, historic spaces such as the Great Room seem to be very popular so far of course, but many students have taken to exploring the more hidden nooks and crannies of the upper floors in search of the perfect, quiet study spot.
While construction is complete on most of the building, some spaces, including the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab and the fifth floor, are currently closed to the public. The Innovation Lab will open in phases later this spring.
This semester, visitors and students will have a variety of new spaces to explore in the building.
On the second floor of Historic Farrell Library, a new reading room with lots of natural light includes study space and will house the current periodicals collection. At the opposite end of the space is the new home for the Dow Center for Multicultural and Community Studies. The Virginia Carlson Family Reading Room will open soon on the first floor of Historic Farrell Library. The room will include study space and house the juvenile literature and curriculum materials collections.
On the third floor, visitors and students can marvel at the beautiful, restored Great Room or Harry Potter Room. A meditation space and Wudu wash station are available to all patrons. Additional study spaces on the third floor allow for a quieter atmosphere than the floors below.
Libraries staff and Belfor crews have been busy processing, organizing and returning books to the shelves. So far, over 25,000 boxes have been returned to Hale Library for reshelving. Stacks A through C are filled in addition to most of stack D. The music and art collection has also been reshelved on the third floor.
The fourth floor, as the quiet floor, provides study space for those who prefer a quiet space to concentrate on their work. More collaboration rooms, computers, printers and scanners are available in the newly opened spaces as well as four additional family and gender-neutral restrooms.
We can’t wait to see the building fill up more as more folks come to visit the new building and explore what Hale Library has to offer them. In the coming weeks, we hope to share more photos of the spaces being used, as well as updates on spaces like the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab.
The only question left to ask is, when are you going to come check out Hale Library?
Breathtaking beautiful! It brought tears to my eyes to see my “second home” for many, many years so lovingly restored! Thank you all for your hard work and patience through a very difficult time.
Pleased to see how good the Great Room still looks after such devastation. When I came to K-State, I had never seen anything like it. It was nice to discover years later while traveling in Europe that it was replicating medieval history far away on the Kansas prairie. It is a tribute to our founders who valued books and learning.