To: The Wellesley College Community
From: Paula Johnson, President; Andrew Shennan, Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College; and Ravi Ravishanker, CIO and Associate Provost
Re: Major gift in support of the Clapp Library renovation
Date: March 6, 2024
We are pleased to share some exciting news about the ongoing renovations to Clapp Library.
Thanks to the tremendous generosity of two longtime donors to the College, we are now able to expand the Clapp project to include three significant enhancements that will make Wellesley’s library an even more welcoming and dynamic center for learning, scholarship, and pedagogy. We are deeply grateful to these donors for their philanthropic leadership and for their visionary support of this critical project.
The first enhancement is the relocation of the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center (PLTC) and Accessibility and Disability Resources (ADR) from the third floor to the large area on the second floor adjacent to the presidential portraits reading room, currently occupied by the help desk and the Library and Technology Services (LTS) offices. Moving the PLTC and ADR to a more central location will allow us to design spaces for these important student-facing programs that meet today’s (and tomorrow’s) needs. It will also enhance the visibility and accessibility of these resources and co-locate them close to the Writing Program in the Brackett Reading Room. The help desk will move to a convenient location in the front lobby area, and the suite of LTS offices will move to the third floor space currently used by the PLTC and ADR.
This more central location for the PLTC and ADR will have the additional advantage of benefiting from the second enhancement: a striking new staircase that will become a centerpiece for the library. This staircase will make it far easier to move between the first and second floors, inviting café patrons into other parts of the library and drawing library users down to the café. It will also bring more natural light from the atrium to the ground floor below.
Third, the main lobby and service desk will be redesigned and modernized to become the kind of welcoming space the new library deserves. By locating the help desk in close proximity to the service desk and updating spaces for other important user services, we will enable our outstanding LTS staff to meet the needs of students, faculty, and staff even more comprehensively and efficiently than before.
We are thrilled that this transformative gift has given the College the opportunity to reimagine the possibilities for Clapp Library and provide our students and faculty with greater access to its impressive resources and knowledgeable staff.
As you may not be surprised to learn, these major improvements to the renovation plan will require us to modify the project’s schedule. We will need to push back our original completion date from the end of 2024 to the summer of 2025. This means the library will be ready for operation in late summer 2025, in time for the beginning of the 2025–26 academic year. We believe these changes will increase our community’s enjoyment and use of the library so significantly that a one-semester delay in reopening is acceptable, even if not ideal. The ad hoc faculty advisory committee and the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policy (ACLTP) share our sense that the disadvantages of this short-term delay will be more than offset by the long-term benefits.
We want to thank all those who have been—and continue to be—central to the progress of this project. This includes the ad hoc faculty advisory committee, the ACLTP, and the Dean of Students Advisory Committee, as well as all our colleagues in Facilities Management and Planning, LTS, and Development.
We are all eager for the project to be completed, and we thank everyone for their patience and support. We look forward with confidence and excitement to a 21st-century Clapp Library—a center of active, collaborative learning and teaching, a treasury of human knowledge, and a place where technology and resources of all kinds spur creativity, discovery, and the highest levels of scholarship.
