Library Master Planning Committee Hires Architectural and Planning Consultant

Following is a message to the University community from Fred Sweitzer, chair of the Library Master Planning Steering Committee.

The Library Master Planning Steering Committee is pleased to announce the selection of Sasaki Associates, Inc. to be our architectural and planning consultants. Sasaki is a large, comprehensive firm with broad and deep experience in higher education and academic libraries. Although they are large, they organize into small project teams, giving the feel of a more intimate firm. Sasaki has worked on a number of academic library projects. Bryan Irwin, who will lead the team, has recently worked on libraries at SUNY Oswego, SUNY Buffalo, The University of New Brunswick, Lorain County Community College (Ohio) and the University of Missouri at Kansas City (which has an autonomous music library within the main library).

In our interviews with them, they were engaging, comfortable to work with, and easy to envision engaging our community in this planning process. They are sensitive to different user populations, as well as to learning style differences within and among groups. They also understand the need to cultivate community buy-in and participation all along the way. Hence, their recommendations and thinking will be guided both by careful data collection and analysis and by talking extensively with users and other stake holders.

The committee will now be working with Sasaki to design our process of investigation, imagination, and consultation. All stakeholders in our academic community will have multiple opportunities to participate in this process. I look forward to giving you more details about the process once they are known. And I look forward to this partnership as we pool our intellectual resources to envision and design for a library system to carry us into the future.