The top three floors of the Albert Glickman Library in Portland are being renovated for the first time since the University bought the building in 1993. The $3 million job, scheduled for completion in mid-March of 2004, will make the top three floors of the library available with many new facilities. In addition to brand new facilities on the top three floors, the work includes a new layout on the first floor and a second elevator.
The three new floors will house new stacks, or general book storage. There will be more study space in the form of desks and tables, as well as three new group-study rooms: two on the seventh floor and a third on the sixth floor. There will be strategically placed Internet access jacks for laptop computers, and the library will be among the first on campus to officially provide wireless Internet access.
“They had to jackhammer through 18 inches of concrete at one point,” said Barbara Smith, the acting library director at the Albert Glickman Library. As a tooth-jarring buzz emanated from the walls of her office on the fourth floor she patiently raised her precise librarian’s voice to describe the construction.
The construction is proceeding ahead of schedule despite many challenges, Smith said. These challenges arose because the building was originally a bakery. The sixth floor held two-story-tall mixing vats, and the fifth floor held mammoth ovens. The fifth and sixth floors were therefore built with extra thickness to support these massive appliances. Those have since been jack hammered to normal thickness, and a brand new cement floor has been laid for the seventh level, where before was an airy space through which the hulking mixers intruded. Construction crews also had to drill out a pit for the second elevator. The floors were strewn with construction equipment and only the outline of future rooms was visible in the form of metal wall studs.
“The fifth floor will be very student-centric,” Smith said. That floor will house a computer-equipped classroom, similar to the two that are in Luther Bonney above the computer lab. It will seat 30 students, each with their own computer, and a teacher station that can control the rest. There will also be a small cafeteria with vending machines on the fifth floor where, unlike the rest of the library, food can be consumed without fear of computers and books getting soiled.
“That will be nice because students won’t have to run to the student center to eat their lunch,” Smith said as swarthy construction workers leered from the dark recesses of the unfinished development. There will also be a small computer lab with about 15 computers equipped like those in the main lab at Luther Bonney. Smith also described a meeting room where University staff can work with librarians.
The sixth floor’s main feature will be a “Special Collections Department,” which will house University archives and rare books that are presently scattered throughout the Portland and Gorham campuses. This department will feature a large glass edifice to the left as patrons disembark the elevator. Materials will be displayed here, much as is done now with the Osher map library on the first floor. Much of the sixth floor will be storage for this department. There will also be a special reading room for the public and some office space for the staff who will retrieve and care for the protected materials.
“Every great University has what is called ‘The Great Reading Room,'” Smith said. And now USM will have its own Great Reading Room. Its location will be the seventh and topmost floor, the room will occupy a full quarter of the floor space on this level. The room will be equipped with luxurious Thomas Moser furniture and boast a panoramic view east to the Back Bay and south to the Portland skyline “We really took advantage of the best view from the library for this room,” Smith said.
The seventh floor will also feature an events room with space for a catering staff and also a removable stage. The catering area will be serviced by a freight elevator and the whole area will be accessed by glass-trimmed double doors.
The former study area on the first floor will host the Interlibrary Loan Department, which has historically been spread around the library.
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