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The transportation of books and materials from Penrose Library to their temporary home at the Hampden Center in Southwest Denver started April 18 and continued through last week.
These first two weeks of book transportation are coming in the midst of much anticipation as the start of construction on the library begins in June.
The project, which will transform Penrose into the Academic Commons, will cost $32 million, including the book transportation.
The transportation process is now on hold until the end of finals in June. After finals are completed, the book moving will start up again.
The movement of materials is going smoothly, according to Nancy Allen, the dean of Penrose.
“The process has gone extremely well,” said Allen. “We have wonderful staff, including many students, working with the movers.”
Senior Chloe Campbell, who works at the library, thinks that the moving process is going well.
“Everyone is helping out in their respective departments to make an easier move for the library as a whole,” she said.
By the end of Wednesday last week, the movers had transported almost 20,000 linear feet of library material, said Allen. The first part of the move focused on the least-used materials, including bound journal volumes and seldom-used books.
The Hampden Center is a 51,500-square-foot storage facility in southwest Denver, recently purchased by the university for both temporary and permanent library material storage.
While the library is under construction, there will be a temporary library set up in the Driscoll Ballroom. Shuttles will bring requested materials back and forth from the Hampden Center to DU.
Campbell thinks that there will be an adjustment process involved with moving library services into the smaller space. Like Penrose, the temporary library will have study spaces and a computer lab, though on a smaller scale.
“The temporary library set up in Driscoll will take some getting used to,” said Campbell. “Right now we just have to figure out how to downsize everything and provide the most needed services.”
Despite its smaller size, Campbell thinks the Driscoll Ballroom will ultimately become an efficient and effective temporary library space.
“Overall, I think the transition will be smooth once we figure out exactly how the space will work,” she said.
While the temporary library is in use, students can browse the Peak catalogue of library materials online, request items through the system and then pick the materials up at the ballroom after receiving an email notification of their arrival.
This request system is already in place, so if students need access to materials that have already been moved to the Hampden Center they can request them online, and the materials will be sent to the library for pickup.
Allen hopes the turnaround process will be no more than a few hours.
“We will need to test every procedure to improve speed and efficiency, but the library is committed to good service, so I am sure we will have a smooth and successful transition to delivery services after the collection moves,” she said.
After the construction is completed, which the university hopes will be in December 2012, the Hampden Center will continue to permanently house about 80 percent of the library collection. This will be many low-use materials, including most of the bound journal volumes, government publications, microforms and boxed archival collections.
Students can still check out these materials via the Peak library catalogue, and shuttles will transport requested materials from the Hampden Center to DU.
The most popular, most frequently checked out and most recent books (less than 10 years old), as well as those used by faculty for teaching, will be moved back into the Academic Commons.
This system, where the bulk of the collection will be at the off-site storage facility and the most popular books will be kept at DU, has been criticized by some.
Campbell, who likes to browse the stacks to find many sources related to a particular topic, is not in favor of this system.
“Personally, I don’t like this idea at all. I love to go up in the stacks with one call number and browse in an area to find many of my sources,” she said. “I wish we could still keep all of our materials, being both an innovative library and traditional.”
