Allen Library Construction Project 2025: Home

Dates of project

The project is largely complete, aside from fine tuning and furnishing that will continue into summer 2025. The main project was Wednesday, January 8, through mid February 2025.

Proposed change

The Harrison Libraries moved forward to reconfigure the Allen Library footprint and relocate shelving within it. This was needed to create space for heavily used collections that were 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) were 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 were difficult to move or even immobile. Remediation was necessary. Students/faculty could not use collections as intended and were not well served. Now that the project is substantially complete, library are users are THRILLED at the ease with which they can access collections.