Just like that, two major projects that we knew were “in the works” became a reality in the last few months and we have actively begun working on them. One is a renovation of Clapp Library, our main library, and the second is also sort of a “renovation”, but of a different kind – Website redo.

Clapp Library is part of the deferred maintenance initiative at the College and it will receive a much needed redo of its internals – HVAC systems, Plumbing and Roof to name a few. The great advantage is that the building will meet the standards that the College has recently committed to, including the use of infrastructure that supports our environmental sustainability initiatives. In addition, the air circulation and temperature in the building will be far superior to what they are now.

Our current website was redesigned 10 years ago and my colleagues from LTS and I were involved with Public Affairs very closely to implement it. That is a very long time in the web world! So, it is time to redesign the website. It is another non trivial and complex project!

The timeline for Clapp project is a 15 month period starting from June 2023. What this means is that the library will be inaccessible for a period of 15 months starting from next June. Every single thing in the library needs to be moved out and moved back in after the work is complete.Everything, that is right! All books in general collections, everything in Special Collections and Archives. But then, we have a lot of technologies all over the library, our Helpdesk, public access computers, chromeboxes, classrooms, equipment in storage, Knapp Media lab and Makerspace.

We will be working with an ad hoc committee of faculty on two major issues – how do we offer services for the academic community during these fifteen months and how do we manage the rest of the process of moving things in and out. And there are a lot more details that are too early to discuss here. I am so thankful that our staff have already begun thinking about ways we can continue to provide essential services. Lots of out of the box ideas are percolating!

Remember that for about 2 years we provided support for the academic community remotely when COVID crisis was in play. And the community members were very accommodating and understanding alternate methods for accessing library and technology resources and had to deal with limited in person access. However, that changed in the last few months, when the use of the library began to increase and trending back to pre-COVID usage. It is indeed possible for us to apply what we learned from COVID crisis to help us think about this, but we really are trying to do much better.

The other is the website redesign. We are in the very early stages of the discovery and design and expect to have a new site to be ready by early 2024. You can imagine how tough a project this will be. We plan to have an external facing website targeted at our prospective students, parents primarily, but an internal site for our faculty, students and staff. How can we use the lessons learned from the past 10 years to choose a better environment and processes? This is what we are going through.

We believe that a successful outcome of this requires sustainable governance and participation from the community members. When it comes to the web, content is king and how in a highly distributed environment like ours we balance the independence of content creation with consistent content. Besides, the content consumption varies tremendously by age groups and various other factors. How do we balance this? We have engaged some experts to help us sort through all of this.

As exciting as these are in that they provide opportunities to rethink some of what we have been doing and improve them, they are also daunting, especially when you think about having to do all of the work in addition to your day job!

As the saying goes, “there is never a dull moment”. It has been true all my professional life in the Higher Ed! And it continues…