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Allen Library Construction Project 2025: Home

This is a guide to the Allen Library shelving repair, construction, and materials relocation project in January 2025.

The Project

Dates of project

Wednesday, January 8, through Friday, January 31 (with most finished by Friday, January 24).

Proposed change

The Harrison Libraries are moving forward to reconfigure the Allen Library footprint and relocate shelving within it. This is needed to create space for heavily used collections that are trapped in broken compact mobile shelving. The revised footprint keeps materials, staff expertise, and facilities as one contiguous unit. 

Why is this needed? What happened? 

Six mobile compact shelving carriages in the Allen Library (chiefly books) are not working as intended, as result of poor decisions at the design/engineering stage before 2017. The carriages experienced issues almost immediately upon installation in 2017, and became largely immobile in February 2020. After pandemic-related delays, carriages were completely re-installed summer 2021 by a new service provider. (The original installer was no longer in business.) That did not work. The carriages experienced ongoing issues, and failed again in December 2023. They are difficult to move or even immobile. Remediation is necessary. Students/faculty cannot use collections as intended and are not well served. 

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