 So, and I'm Tom Hickerson and I'm going to lead off in the presentation, and my colleague Shauna Sadler will pick up after that. So the University of Calgary is nearing the completion of the Taylor Family Digital Library, a new 265,000 square feet facility in the center of the campus, housing the main library, University Archives, the University Art Museum, and the University Press. This time also a high density facility for a storage facility is being built at the edge of the city, where in addition to books and journals, art and archives and artifacts will also be held. These facilities reflect the integrated mission of libraries and cultural resources, a principal division of the University of Calgary, and also reflect our vision for the convergence of knowledge and culture. And this is what it looks like in the daytime and I'm going to show you the nighttime shortly so, which is really my favorite. Today's presentation is about the development of a technology plan appropriate to supporting 21st century research and learning, to serving as a central hub for information and media dissemination, campus-wide, and to being a center for art and culture, cultural heritage for the city, the region, and beyond. I really love this at night and my colleague, the associate vice president for facilities who worked as a partner with it said, you know, when we were looking at the various images because we're in Canada, he said, you know, we should really care what it looks like at night because that's the way most people will see it. But it also is a sort of illuminated presence, a center for knowledge and activity being sort of transmitted out across the heart of the campus during the nighttime hours. Before turning to comments specifically to the technologies, I want to say a few words about underlying vision and our design for the future, the concept of media is elemental. It is the medium in which information, image, and sound is manifest, it's the form in which knowledge is created and the means by which art, intelligence, and understanding is disseminated. And while not all media is digital, and in fact the tailor includes large collections of books and journals and special collections and artifacts, digital technologies exercise, an increasingly ubiquitous role in recording and communicating the human experience. Therefore, visual display, audio and video utilization and multi-dimensional visualization are crucial capabilities. Collaboration is central to current day technologies role in the creation of knowledge and its use. Presently, touch is pivotal in information manipulation and as the collection of the 21st century evolves, the capacity to reflect real-time data will be of increasing importance. Additionally, we assume that change will be constant and that the technologies should be empowering, convenient, and really cool. So the outline for today's talk is to talk about an organizational overview, project overview, realignment and strategic planning, role of technology consultants in this project, the technologies themselves, and where we found ideas and inspiration. So the University of Calgary is only 45 years old. It's located in a million person city in Western Canada and Alberta. It has about 30,000 students, 19% of which are graduate students, and the library is in cultural resources as principal division. The Taylor Family Digital Library is an element of that. There are five campus branches, University Art Museum, University of Calgary Press, the high-density storage facility. We have a nursing facility, a nursing faculty in Doha Cutter and operate the library there. We also operate the Health Information Network which provides access to electronic information for physicians and researchers and health and wellness professionals. And in that role, we run knowledge centers, small libraries and all the major hospitals in the region and the Tom Baker Cancer Institute. The Military Museums is one of the two historical facilities of the Canadian Forces and we run a library and archives there and oversee the art gallery. And also the newly constructed Down Count Campus gives us a library in the heart of the city and is an avenue whereby we can strengthen our outreach to the Calgary community. We also want the building to be a hub for innovation in the sense that it's not just what's in the building and this has actually influenced the kinds of renovations we're doing in the other facilities on campus. Health Sciences Library is a particular example of that that's employing the models that we developed for the Taylor. Downtown Campus is doing similarly. Science and Engineering has a digital globe like those that we're incorporating into the Taylor. And also we have a public art program that provides art for a lot of the newer buildings on campus and is part of our community outreach in terms of campus-wide but also across the city. In order to accomplish this, we conducted to prepare for the move into the building. We conducted a strategic review process. In this process we took curators, museum curators, librarians, archivists, also managerial and support staff, faculty from other departments, campus IT, and we developed six teams that were organized around areas of activity, not functional. So in fact then they included representatives and they thought about how can we all contribute to this. And those included learning, collections, research, technology and media, outreach and community relations and staffing. And while those groups did lots of interviews, did focus groups with the student government groups, one of the most important things we did were more than 30 hour-long interviews with faculty members and many disciplines across the campus. And we learned a lot about our successes and unfortunately a little bit about our failures. And out of that came a new organization arranged around areas of outcome rather than functional activities that allowed us to bring together the various disciplines and the various collections in the pursuit of common production and common outcomes. And those are around research, collections, learning and center for scholarly communication. The building had a principal project team and those include Shauna who I'll say a few words about later who focused on the technology for the plan for the building. But also something that grew out of that was that she also became responsible for the public furniture. So the relationship between furniture and the technologies employed is one that you might not see on day one but it's absolutely essential and it's amazing how the technologies and the furniture work in common. Jackie Bell worked with me on the side of the program, on the various programmatic entities in the building, how they should be organized in the building, size of areas, proximity to other related activities in this very large building. In the project overview our principal partners in terms of the people who worked with us in building of the building were Kazian architecture and design, a firm based in Vancouver but also with a large office in Calgary which actually is increasingly has most of its offices in China is my sense of their current development. They did not have experience in building libraries and as it turned out that probably was a good idea because we're really not a very conventional library. When I mentioned the Art Museum, the Art Museum is right in the center of the building. It's right on the main hallway through the building. It opens above, students can see down from the learning commons into a two floor major gallery and went from a situation where they have about 25,000 visitors a year to a situation where 5,000 to 10,000 people will walk by their door every day and we really had some programmatic aspects that would not have been common to libraries built in previous days. So they came to us with a real open mind about what this building might be. Canna Construction was the construction manager and principal construction company. Stan Tech was the principal engineering firm and Sexton Technology Consultants Shana will talk about them. In a few moments they were the principal audio visual and technology consultants on the program. We did not hire them. They came with the bid from the architects and the bid from the architects. All of these groups were chosen before I arrived in Calgary four and a half years ago. They were chosen by our campus facilities development and maintenance group who we worked very closely with, in fact the associate vice president that I mentioned. He and I are the ones that have our names on the schematics for every floor in the building. So if there's any credit, well that'll be good, but we also have the blame. I was responsible for the programmatic layout of the building and all the various floors and he was responsible for the construction and engineering elements. So one of the things as I said we assume change is constant. So we wanted to build a building that was right for 2011, but would be right for 2015 and 2020 and 2025 in ways that we presently don't foresee. So one of the things that we were insistent on and we had a real premium in cost around having access flooring, raised flooring, which allows you to have all your network connections and electrical in the floor, which allows you to bring that up in any place in the building. We also, 60% of our walls are demountable so we assume that someone else will change the building in very dynamic ways on a regular basis over time, and this allows them the ability to do that. Also another great thing about the raised flooring is that all of the heating and cooling is there. So it's what's called a field plenium. The air is just there and you open vents in the floor that allow the air to rise. So you don't have hot air being forced down from those little fans that are in all of your offices that don't work about half the time. And so it's also about the healthiest air possible for human existence. We also really probably overbuilt the technological capability of the building in terms of planning for the future. The two 10 gig fiber backbones are really beyond what we need on day one, but they really were necessary to provide the kind of distribution that we wanted. There are a lot of antennas all over the building for wireless support, some sort of remarkable statistics on the number of network ports and so forth. So it's a very complex building in terms of the construction. So we moved from the construction to choosing the technologies, and this is the point that I'm going to turn it over to Shana who served as the technology officer for the building. And I'll say a couple of words about choosing her to do this job because beyond the basic construction and the network infrastructure, we had about $13 million to spend on technology. And none of us were prepared to know what in the 21st century exactly we should be spending that money on and what were the capabilities. Shana was the coordinator for digital initiatives. She had set up our institutional repository, one of the first in Canada, and also ran our digitization service. But she had, prior to going to information school, she had been a worked in web design during the tech boom and lost her job during the tech bust and decided that perhaps libraries were a good place to take those skills. I look back on Christine Bergman's presentation this morning. I share those decades that she talked about the experience of and it's interesting and thinking about how do we design a building that's right for millennials and how do we know what millennials need. And so I'm not saying that it was a selection criteria, criterion specifically, but the fact that Shana is a Gen X, putting her a little closer to the people that she was designing the facility for, in some degree the relative newness to her work. And she has, you know, several years, she wasn't new by any means, but also what I found in my experience of the first couple of years with her was a tremendous openness. And I think in terms of involving people in their technology areas, that's a really essential quality. So there's a lot of things about the building I can talk about, but there's nobody better to talk about the technologies than Shana. Thank you, Tom. That was really kind. And he had also threatened to point out that I had sun and wind burnt myself surfing on the weekend, so I appreciate that. That was a part of my profile. So yes, I am the technology officer for our fabulous new Taylor Family Digital Library. We're really excited about it. I did work closely with Sexton Group, the technology consultants. Together we worked on about three-quarters of the technologies of the building together. For those of you who are in a construction program yourself or about to be, with Sexton, the services they provided, they wrote the narrative for the technologies, specifications list, the issue for construction drawings, and they wrote the RFP for the AV integrator and the tremendous amounts of work. And they did it in a very professional and very detailed manner, and I really appreciate the work that they brought to our building. We're a great success because of their excellence. So planning the overall technology plan was an iterative process with several different groups. To meet our vision of a technologically progressive library, we did have to speak with lots of different people, and I had to keep open ears for different ideas from different perspectives. One of them was a faculty member in our computer science department. Her name is Sheila Carpendale. She has specialty in touch technologies and visualization. And when I explained to her some of our ideas and our vision for the new building, she had tremendous enthusiasm and not just enthusiasm, but she had postdocs and grad students who wanted to help us, which is the best news we ever had. So Miguel Nascenta, he's a postdoc with Sheila who has specialties in touch technologies. He's actually moving to St. Andrews University very soon to be a professor there. And Uta Hendrix, who is, she has experience with touch technologies, a lot of data visualization, especially in cultural heritage. So she brings some wonderful assets to our planning. We do have smart technologies across the street from us. It's very fortunate. So I sat down with their custom solutions folks and we discussed again our vision. And together we have designed a few different touch tables to help facilitate learning and research in our building. And I'll show you a few of them in a moment. The AV integrator, the successful AV integrator, Sharps Audiovisual. And that's Andrea Cobbled, our project manager. And they're the ones who have taken the sextant program and ordered and installed it in our building. So we work very closely with them on more of the details and the realities of these technologies in the building. So one of the first areas and certainly most popular right now in the building are the student collaborative work rooms. As you can see, we've built in tables, but we've added a nice big 52 inch screen, a NECP series screen. We have a Mac Mini that drives the contents and a cable cubby that provides multiple cables for students to bring various input sources into the room. So if they want to bring in their own laptop, a VCR, a DVD player, an Xbox, whatever, they can bring it into the room and use it. There is a Crestron control panel switch to switch the input sources. We've also noticed that we do have these rooms across three floors and managing these rooms, you know, who has it booked now, we expect it to be a bit of an issue. And we wanted to encourage peer management. And the students, as part of the process of talking to them, they prefer a lot more self-service and we wanted to provide that for them. So we actually created this custom touch screen. You can see the pointer right here. This is a touch screen that we created. So it's on the outside door of every collaborative workroom and above it there's an LED light that shows red or green depending if the room's available or not. And the touch screen shows who has the room now and students can also book the room right at the space. So we've had really positive response from students on this. There's a little black space just underneath it and we're just setting up our digital signage program right now and we do plan to run some digital signage underneath and we hope to do marketing of our programs and collections so far on this space. An element that Sexton brought that we weren't aware of was this product from a company called Tidebreak and the product that we're looking at here for this instance is TeamSpot. So when the students sit in the collaborative workroom together and they all have their own mobile technologies, in the past they independently would work on the file. But with TeamSpot it turns that Mac Mini into a local server so all the students can log in and work on the same file at the same time. So the file goes up on that big 52 inch screen and the students all bring their mice from their mobile technologies to the big screen. They click on the screen, they take control, edit the text that everybody can see at the same time and then another one can take control and they take turns working on the same document at the same time. So we really wanted to facilitate collaboration and student group work and this is one of the ways we've done so. We've done a gentle rollout of this software taking small groups of students aside and teaching them this and we've had really strong support for it so we're excited to do the math rollout. We've also added presentation practice rooms. A section group was fantastic in this. They brought this to our attention and have built these in other libraries so we were able to learn from the experience of others. What we do is we took the collaborative workroom and took it a step further. So it's the same layout but the screens are a bit bigger and there's a webcam. And what the students do is they put their presentation on the screen, hit record, the webcam turns on and records the students practicing their presentation. They stop the presentation and they can review it so they can see where they're hesitating, maybe fidgeting too much, really practice before they go into the classroom. Again, we're finding a lot more requirements from professors for students to do presentations and we're hoping that these facilities help our students be more successful in their programs. We also dedicated one room to a... We added a video conference system so that way students can participate in conferences such as this in locations remote from our campus. In this new building we have four classrooms where we teach students how to do research. As you can see it's still under construction. The essence of where all those chairs are will be desks with computers. There will be a standard podium and projector and screen that we see in most classrooms. The podium is a campus standard so that way our faculty who are presenting in this room when they go across campus and present elsewhere have a familiar setup so they can feel successful in both locations. Now the company Tidebreak has a product called ClassSpot and we invested in this one. They also have one called ClassSpot PBL which we've decided to go with. So in ClassSpot the instructor can control the content on all the screens and really empower the instructor so the instructor can force content his or her content onto the student screens or possibly take a student screen and share that amongst the whole group as well as the central presentation screen. The PBL aspect, the instructor can then break the classroom into small groups so if they want to assign group tasks you three computers, you work on this project and then all three computers can collaborate at the same time just like the student work rooms so that way that provides more interactive and collaborative opportunities for instruction in this space. I felt a little bit competitive when they came to these classrooms so I wanted to take it just a step further than what other people have done. So on the side of the classrooms and it's kind of hard to see here but along this wall each classroom will receive two 70 inch touch screens and Andrea is leaning on one. Andrea and I are the same height. The two touch screens are massive and we've got them touch enabled from NEC. So when the instructor has control of not only the projector with the screen behind them but the two touch screens on the side of the room as well so maybe if you wanted to add additional content maybe reference materials or any sort of additional information they can do that. With the PBL aspect of the class bot they can also turn those touch screens into part of the group work so maybe those three desktops are enhancing the interactive aspects of instruction. Like all new buildings we all have digital signage, we have to have that. We've gone with the OmniVec system for a few different reasons we felt they did understand our needs and could serve them better. Also their products and development were along our lines as well so we're currently working with them on interactive signage similar to what you find in shopping malls right now. This is quite a complicated, confusing building so we're hoping that this touch interactive software will help us provide clarity to our students also meeting their desire for more self-service. When I started this project Tom gave me a very aggressive mandate not just only to be a technologically progressive library but he also had asked for support for broadcast and boy that sure made the guys at Sexton tonight scratch our heads how are we gonna do that we really didn't know but they came through for me good old Sexton and what this does is it encodes and decodes through encoders and decoders so we're in Calgary and close by is BAMF and of course the BAMF Center hosts several fantastic arts performing arts programs so if we were to take one of our encoders send it to BAMF they could connect that to their video camera the video camera records the performance the encoder encodes that content sends it over IP the server room sends it to a decoder which we have attached to a screen or a projector and we can view the performance live as close to live as possible so this is really exciting for us the ability to packet real time video data over IP is really exciting and made me really appreciate that we invested in the infrastructure we're gonna work with high vision and see if we can do interactive exhibits as well as Tom mentioned we do have the museum in this new building and we do have a strong mandate for new media art and a big aspect of new media art is interactive exhibitions so with high vision we're working with them to see if we can deliver interactive exhibitions remotely so if there's an exhibit in Beijing can our students participate in that exhibition from our campus some of the feedback we receive from our students and faculty as well is that they love our e-collections we got strong support to keep building them the issue they all had the desktop monitors are too small they love these e-collections they have lots of windows open at the same time but they just need a new surface area so for students we are building an LCD wall for them and we're putting this touch table in front of it so the students can drive the content on the screens themselves it's not a passive display board like we've seen in the past the students are taking control they put their content up so again with the touch table it enables collaborative work so group work on a nice big digital space so we can hopefully facilitate group work with large e-collections and hopefully it's in a very public space as well so maybe inspire others SMART had delivered the actual lectern itself just as a demo trial for when we were practicing setup so I just had to grab a quick picture of it but we couldn't install it until hopefully next week so when we did the original work with Sexton I said to them why are we just looking at information flat what are some other innovative ways of looking at information and they came back with this product called a digital globe why not look at things round we don't have to look at things flat and I thought that was really exciting and a fun way of looking at things these are quite popular in science centers and of course any sort of area that wants to display things especially geographically based we've received strong support from our faculty and students that have geographic leanings in their research but last week I took the English department through and one of their PhDs and faculty were really excited to use this as a means of displaying creative works and creative writing and the PhD specifically said she wanted to display her poetry in a round space rather than just flat and that provided lots of new opportunities for her so I thought that was really exciting I was also not just to have one for the public space that we needed to have a second one that faculty could book and use for their research and they didn't want to share it with the undergrads so this looks like an interesting opportunity for us as Tom had mentioned we do have the museum in the building we do have a strong infrastructure in this space as well every 7.5 meters we have floor boxes that contain electrical and data outlets as well I worked with a faculty member in the Fine Arts department who specializes in digital art and this was his recommendation to provide lots of outlets in lots of places not just the floor but the ceiling and that provides lots of opportunities for creative setups of their exhibitions he also identified that one of the major issues is trying to discreetly place the equipment that runs these digital exhibitions and so we had proposed a server room so they could be placed in the background rather than on the floor and he was very supportive of that so again this is another way we're going to use the high vision system as the decoder and coder to do real time delivery of exhibitions in the museum as well Sexton brought this new product they said Shauna this is so cool you have to check this out the company called Christie Digital has a new product out it's about 2 years on the market now and they've described them as high resolution Lego blocks so you can create any sort of screen that you want and it is really quite fun we did purchase 50 of them and it's incredibly easy to set them up and they talk to each other and they do wonderful color and brightness balancing and the resolution really is quite stunning fantastic for marketing opportunities impromptu exhibitions the technical requirements is quite low so it's easy to set up and take down we did consider using them as a work display screen but we've actually found that the brightness is too much that it's a hard screen to work from because they're so bright and that it's much better for marketing I'm glad we kept it to the 50 and we also expect to use them in the museum as well overall we are trying to create this flexible and dynamic technological support for the library, the archives and the museum in the building and to do this we created an equipment pool to help support new ideas, new initiatives and just to be a little bit more flexible and responsive to the needs of our professionals in the building we've also found that it's also handy to hot swap items out as projectors goes down it's awfully handy to have a couple spares in the equipment pool to do a quick swap so that class that you're being taught tomorrow that has a projector that's working and this accident helped us with three quarters of the technology in the building so there's one quarter that we really took on ourselves and when I was looking for inspirations I kept coming back to Seattle Public Library they have on their fifth floor reference desk a checked out data visualization screen and they worked with a faculty member from UC Santa Barbara to create this exhibition and so in our library we're going to, this is an architectural rendering of black and white on the left and that's what our reference desk is going to look like on the right is what it looks like today without screens, still waiting for those brackets to show up so what are challenges and we're going to work with Sheila Carvendale in the Faculty of Computer Science on this project we're going to work on new and exciting ways of visualizing library data then we're going to shift to archival data then to museum data and then we're going to take on the project of to see if we can converge all three and possibly bring in real time delivery of these data sets we're hoping for innovative ways of expressing our data especially behind the scenes data so people have a greater appreciation for what happens behind the scenes not necessarily what's happening on the library floor as we've been talking about it's quite popular right now we all understand that the students are bringing their mobile technologies with them and we want to support that, that's really exciting and good for us so when I started working on this there are tremendous amounts of new ideas came to us and the students really were drivers of ways that we could support them with their mobile technologies first again part of that Google session and actually one of our archivists who is German brought this information back the Free University of Berlin Library has just a beautiful new space in building and it may be hard to see here but they created these workspaces for students that nice and discreetly place a desk lamp, an electrical outlet and a security bar so students can bring their mobile technologies with a Kensington lock or some, it's like a bicycle lock and they can lock it to the space that way they can go to the washroom or go get a cup of coffee without having to ask the person next to them to look after their technology so I took inspiration from that we have new study spaces for our students they're about four and a half feet wide because students sure have a lot of stuff with them now and they will include an electrical outlet and a security lock I'm hoping to do the desktop lamps as well but that darn budget sure gets annoying doesn't it we are also supporting mobile technology by including electrical outlets throughout the floors middle of the floors everywhere so that students can plug in and charge their technologies so to support the electrical outlets being mid floor we purchased furniture that is quite lightweight and easily rearranged not only that but we talked to the interior designers and we found that there are new interior design standards for table height to support mobile technology so the ergonomics of working on a laptop a little bit lower but two or three inches lower table height and that way your shoulders are a bit further down it's much more comfortable to work long term on the tables we did incorporate bean bags and we found that students do want their cozy spaces and we want to support that as well we have just specced laptop tables for bean bags as well so they're quite low given the bean bags that we've purchased and we're looking forward to bringing them in to the building I saw some pictures from Queensland University and they have these cubes right here and it turned out to be a California company makes outdoor furniture which I thought was great you can always take them outside and hose them down make it to your degree from the students these have been fantastic because they're incredibly lightweight and students are using them for multiple purposes not just seating but also as an extra table somewhere to put up their feet and it's a quick, nice, easy way of using the space we worked with the bookstore on our campus and we installed a vending machine that supports all sorts of items in it and some of them are to support mobile technologies we'll see there's a USB key that's available CDs, batteries there is the Kensington lock available in this vending machine as well and then some of the more I guess mundane items like tile and all and posted notes and recipe cards so the students have responded positively to this this is in a section of the library that is open 24 hours, 5 days a week so it's especially helpful for students when it's in the later hours on the third floor of our new building we are going to create a new media facility the furniture's not installed yet the best picture I could show you was proof that we have bought the Mac Pro computers and the nice big cinema displays we're going to do 16 Mac Pro computers with the full Adobe suites and other innovative softwares to help students manipulate the electronic collection for providing for them we will do 21 iMacs to do a little bit more lightweight editing software four edit suites two would all have Mac Pros and two PCs we did the PCs because the students union did innovative learning software language learning software provides feedback on your grammar your use of the words etc your accent and those are PC runs so we're going to do PCs there in this area we're going to create a sandbox area and this is where I'll provide a touch table that you see on the top and a digital globe both will have software development kits so students can write their own programs they can write their own expressions of knowledge in these spaces we have started a gaming area this will be very interesting to see how this goes over it should be a lot of fun there will be three areas the first one is 6 PCs that are dedicated gaming PCs they're terribly large and they're liquid cooled very very powerful machines the appropriate displays to go with them and then we're going to do two console areas the first one is a retrospective console area so the Atari's, the Intellivisions all sorts of wonderful console games that were out in the late 70's and early 80's we're going to do a contemporary gaming area with the Xbox the Wii's, the Kinect system all sorts we do understand that the collection is of course very important to this the students union did fund part of the gaming collection and it turns out we looks like we have the largest gaming collection in Canada and maybe North America now so we will certainly become quite active our faculty across campus in all different departments are giving us tremendous support for this initiative not just to look at gaming as a research area but also to express knowledge in gaming form so we will purchase software development kits again for gaming areas so that our faculty and researchers can express themselves in gaming form we do have support for new media art not just for professional artists but for our students as well and so in the middle of our information in our learning comments right now is our first student art exhibit and this is a graduate student from computational media design and it's an elevator that has retina readers inside and you look at screens and the characters respond to where you're looking so it's a very interesting piece and it just happens to look exactly like our elevator doors so we're hoping people aren't getting too confused with our elevators versus the art piece but it's certainly getting attention and we really want to support the student work and help them with the success of their projects and their work just quickly we did invest in RFID for our building all the books in this building RFID tagged we did invest in a book sortation unit and that's the ingestation right there I want to turn quickly to our support for high-end research in this building I did work with Sheila Carpendale and her graduate students as you can see this is just a rendering that we've developed and this right here is a cube wall that will have high resolution displays so I had earlier mentioned that students and faculty want more real estate for all their digital collections well this is our response to the faculty the high level research end so it will be in essence a floor to ceiling wall to wall high resolution cube wall on the side you'll see that there are touch screens mounted to the wall the computer will probably be mounted that controls all the content to a touch table and that way again it's a collaborative space faculty do tend to work in groups bringing graduate students so that way it's a collaborative friendly area and of course we'll have furniture that is lightweight and movable as well so faculty can create their own spaces in the building this is the committee that's helping me design and build this room they are representatives from across campus all the different disciplines and of course the library the computer science students made it very clear to me that this is how they want to search the library catalog this is the type of room this is the look and feel that they want and so I think I'm going to have my hands full with them to help design this for our library this is what they what they expected maybe for our physics department the astronomical physics so that images of the sun and the data related to the sun and maybe on the side screen some related data that may be used as reference being calibrated we have strong oil and gas so the geosciences is a very strong area on our campus and so in this instance there's an actual image of the mountain topographical map some data and again reference materials in this instance they're looking at the touch table with GIS applications where there's multiple layers and annotation involved and again because it's a flat surface it is group oriented so many people can do many touches and all collaborate on the same file at the same time this one I is one of my favorites this is actually a poster presentation so the screens on the side can support interactive posters so it's not just a static but when people create their posters why not embed files, videos some sort of new media pieces that relate to their research also might be a little more interesting for those of us who are visiting their poster presentations this one is the sound visualization we have some wonderful faculty doing some really interesting work in this field and lastly this is an instance where possibly the president of the university is bringing a potential donor into the building and showing them a dynamic interesting inspiring space that wouldn't they love to be a benefactor for this campus that's doing innovative work I just really quickly want to identify where I found inspiration and new ideas from for this building first of all thank you Tom for allowing me to travel so extensively I really did find not only looking at websites of other institutions and libraries but getting out there and talking to them and seeing them and I thought some of these other spaces were so generous at offering what works for them but a lot of them were quite generous I'll say with what didn't work and what mistakes I should not make on my own of course being a good librarian had to do my literature search and these three works had strong resonance with me and the work especially when it came to the undergraduate planning of spaces this transformation lab report from Denmark I just I found it's so inspiring there I couldn't copy the work that they the new media work they implemented in their library but I found the work so fearless so inspiring and when I found myself bogged down with administrative work and I had to get myself back into a creative space I'd often turn to this report and find inspiration from them every time quickly I am faculty at the university of Calgary and this one article really spoke to me and gave me that light bulb aha moment it's an article by Jeffrey Huang in the Harvard business review and in this article he argues that retail spaces have a physical space that they've worked really hard to develop over the years and they're now creating virtual spaces for their website for shopping experience to happen on the internet and what he's arguing is that architecture firms and companies need to start taking their virtual space and put it inside their physical space to facilitate the customer experience within the retail to really heighten that experience to me that strongly resonated as library is place digital library and can we bring the digital library into the physical library and enhance the student research and learning experience within the physical space so for me that moving forward that's my personal question that I'm going to be working on and I have this fantastic new building as a research lab to work on that question thank you very much please yes hi I'm Andy Ashton from Brown University this is almost overwhelming what you guys are doing here and I'm sure it feels that way to you some days as well I have a number of questions one is what is the actual software that drives a lot of this is it something that's provided by smart is it provided by some of these other consultants or is it something that you've engaged with your faculty in developing custom software especially for the touch devices and the visualization walls sure sure yeah it's all of the above it's a real mixture for the touch tables smart wrote the software for some of them we are using on just the flat touch tables that are normal work height it's really just a standard PC that's on a touch surface and we are working with students to see how they use it big driver for that was when Windows 7 came out that's multi touch enabled and we thought why not just provide this new computer that's flat instead of vertical for students to work on collaborative matters so I think that's certainly an area that we're going to work on and further develop right now it's just a computer part of our partnership with smart is really a research project for them for them to learn from our experience so right now we're projecting a lot of potential realities but I'm sure that we'll get hopefully we'll get smarter every day no pun intended we haven't written very much software of our own at this point and by and large we hope not but exceptions are the workroom booking system that showed you we had that custom screen for we have written our own code in the past and I did look at proprietary systems because there are quite a few out there that are really designed for the corporate environments the logic of the software did not speak to our needs and to customize that software was a tremendous amount of money so we decided to go with the custom screen and utilize our own software I'll ask one more because there's nobody standing behind me but just going forward how do you how do you kind of strategically manage these how do I put this a lot of these technologies have the risk of becoming just curiosities right they're interesting they're cool they're whizzy how do you sort of assess both whether or not they actually are meeting the need that you're identifying and also as new things come up how do you sort of plan fund address the need for new technologies because what from what I see here you're very much I think ahead of where many institutions are and that's risky right so is there an ongoing process is it you know can you just speak to kind of how you picture moving forward once this is established sure sure how about if I start this and you make sure I get everything right so absolutely I think one of the issues we discussed early on in this project is our biggest fear is dust on technology and we've all seen it and it's just heartbreaking so right now we are in the process of just finalizing purchasing and transferring those purchases into installations and operationalizing these work and as you say how do we make sure that it remains relevant to our students and faculty so we are empowering our new our staff in new ways we do have one librarian who's in charge of reference and instruction she's quite engaged with the students and the touch tables right now and again getting their feedback setting up workshops lots of different ways of interacting and keeping the dialogue open so that way we can utilize our programmers to develop in ways that the students and the faculty want so as you say they remain relevant and we don't have dust on them yeah myself moving forward again as you say how do we keep ahead of the curve or how do we stay with the curve and not just get stuck with the technologies we have today and again I understand moving forward that maybe part of my role is as emerging technologies and to keep an eye on on the environment and to maintain the connections that I have made and to grow those connections with other librarians and other maybe non-library industry maybe computer science and some of the other cultural institutions who are technologically progressive as well using young science centers etc and there's lots to learn from all sorts of people there are certainly things that we're not presently staffed and sufficiently knowledgeable in our you know the current range of our expertise so running the visualization lab probably that's that's a physics postdoc we don't have one on our staff so that is one of the positions that we expect to be recruiting for once that we have that installed the area of the broadcasting that I talked about really to have a media background and understand how to take full advantage as well as make the kinds of reciprocal arrangements and so forth that are necessary to deal with both the logistics, the financial cost, the copyright concerns and so forth is really an area that in fact libraries are not staffed for as well so there are positions that we built a requirement for that we really don't have that expertise based today and that's very challenging on the other hand if we only designed what we already have the capacity to do how would be advanced so we have to take these chances I have a question about budget in your presentation you mentioned the 13 million dollar technology plan did you expend that entire amount on what you've described or did you hold some of it back to create an endowment that would pay for some of the replacement of equipment and changes and upgrades or how are you thinking about this? The 203 million dollars that are involved in this project are a mixture of money from the province of Alberta from the Don and Ruth Taylor who made a personal gift of 25 million dollars and also from the federal government and and specifically some of the money from that grant went into the technology budget also we were actually successful in getting the city of Calgary to give 3.2 million dollars towards the museum space but that money was given to realize this and really the ability to set any portion of it aside is not something we can do so we have built a demand that we don't have a substantial endowment to support over time we have had some successful fundraising for and we are actively proceeding on that right now we couldn't get out ahead of the building so the building is part of the convincing of potential donors to support those developments over time so it was a situation where you use it or you lose it there was a moment in time when we had to actually cut 40 million dollars out of the building cost so in fact it was not that we ever really had had money that we weren't using we really had to fight to hang on to the technology budget because we also had to deal with the high density storage facility and one of the great things that to some degree well it's not really clearly apparent in this image but one of the things that the private donors demanded was that a certain amount of the money be used for landscaping in front of the building so that actually it's right in the center of the campus and the area in front of it offers us tremendous opportunities for external activities that play interact with the programs inside the building so everything will be close to grade on day one and yet we'll have substantial challenges but it's not that libraries didn't have these kinds of challenges in the past and hopefully the kinds of technologies that we've implemented are really we waited till the last moment for a lot of these one to know what the hottest thing of the moment was and was there a better product but also for certain things might get less expensive by the time we actually got to the point of purchasing them so I don't think we've been irresponsible about this but it does leave us with challenges and it's not and the answer really can't get any simpler than that unfortunately and are you expecting to make any of these services a fee for service to try to generate some revenue stream that could pay for future upgrades replacement? One of them there are some great spaces in this building and the potential to rent those spaces out with the technologies that are there and so forth certainly is there we have we've started out being resistant to that because we don't want to lose control of the spaces essentially if you'll do it for money then you need to respond to the people who have the money because that becomes the objective of doing that we would like to avoid that so that in fact that we can choose things that are educationally supportive that are community drivers that will enhance the university and enhance our role in the larger world endeavor saying that we also know that we have an asset base that potentially we could utilize one of the things that we didn't show it hasn't been implemented yet is a cafe in the building we personally will not get the proceeds of that but it will be the hottest cafe on campus there's no doubt about that the tables sit out right out against these open windows and so forth so I am sure that a lot of goods will be sold there and the university will that is centrally supported and so that that money will go into the general university coffers but our capacity to contribute to that is important so in our concept of building we have not implemented that kind of asset or exploitation Thank you Hi Mary Ellen Davis with the Association of College and Research Libraries great presentation I'm sure many of us want to book our tickets and come visit right away or when the rest of it is installed I was coming I was struck I'm sorry what October Everybody comes in October I was struck that it seems so far ahead of its time we may all be interested to go back and compare last June they released a future scenario thinking of academic and research libraries that was based on hundreds of academic and research libraries doing evaluation of future scenarios and there were some scenarios and they were similar to this my phone is dead so I can't look it up but I'm dying to go back and see how many thought it would be realized because I think many of us thought it was further away and I'm wondering sort of what inspired you to make this reality now as opposed to saying oh it's too big I mean how did you decide to stretch like this? Well it was a terrific opportunity and to I mean personally I feel like it's one of the greatest opportunities that someone in my line of endeavor would ever have which is to really think about well how would all the pieces fit but also when we did the strategic studies one of the things that we were that just shocked people was that we were not supporting research in the way that people expected us to support research and as a result that there was a large portion of the campus we were not connecting with and so we thought about how can we how can we change our capabilities in a way that we'll address and a lot of those areas of research were really on the cutting edge and an example for the building and this is so exciting for me even though it may not be may not be funded but in the science faculty on campus they put together a twenty million dollar proposal on image and visualization center for the university and with a huge number of disciplines involved mostly in the sciences and engineering but also in education and also in digital humanities and architecture and design and in the visual and we should have incorporated for the proposal one we were right at the front of the proposal as an enabler for this and for the visual they had the vertical slices of the various disciplines and the research they would do and they were were the slices of activity within their model for this image and visualization center and and then around the top and the bottom and the sides were the enablers of it and so one set of enablers were the development of technological of software applications and so on across the top as an enabler was the digital library and that we had convinced them that we could play that kind of role in cutting edge research was in many ways you know it was you know tremendously reaffirming for us that we were moving in the right direction and that we could make the library and the museum and the archives actually a very active and central player an enabler for you know for 2020 research so you know what what you need to go for that and then you know Shana her comment about how I said you know we wanted to broadcast we just the other day she was explaining this to me I said explain that again and she said you said that's what you wanted and I said yeah but I didn't quite realize and how does that work again so we really once we got the momentum going and I will say that it's a little challenging for everyone to be able to conceive of how this plays in their professional space and so forth but we've already began to get lots of instances of people understanding what the new capability is and beginning to run with it at this point at least intellectually and for most of it we can't practice it yet but we think this will also raise the quality of our general capabilities and potential for contributions I'd like to add just quickly that when I was managing the institutional repository when I was working with the faculty on their research that I was depositing I was so inspired by the work they were doing I was so innovative, so exciting I was so happy to facilitate the dissemination of it but I could see that there were facilities particularly for departments that were not terribly wealthy and that what I thought was really the strength of the libraries were the great equalizer can we provide these labs, these facilities for the not so wealthy departments and really facilitate their growth and help them become wealthy and also my time on the reference desk and in the learning commons, the information commons and spending a time with the students and watching them work as groups and bring in their mobile technologies and ask questions, how can I do this and why can't I do that and I'm like oh, we should be supporting this and then when we had the opportunity I had some ideas and I proposed them and here we are today so thank you for your question I'm Mark Stover from San Diego State University I have two questions one is I'm intrigued about the loss of the 40 million dollars and what you had to cut out when you discovered that you wouldn't have that money to spend and then another question is how many FTE staff is building and about what is the percentage breakdown between public service staff and behind the scenes staff so in answer to your first question about what did we did we have to cut out of the building when we had to cut 40 million and it was it was a wild weekend and I still remember the weekend I think it was a Sunday night and basically I worked with a consultant in Vancouver and so what we really knew was that if we did not make the cuts that the cuts would be made for us and so we wanted to control maintain control of the program and so for two days I was sort of saying and Jackie Bell had said to me she said Tom you can't we're not going to get 40 million by Nicola Dimes you know we really got to give up some areas and one of the things that we decided was that we wanted to keep the museum we really think that university museums are challenged that they need an opportunity to take their riches into the principal research and teaching mission of the university and the way they're created as autonomous entities they're not well positioned to do that so we not only have brought them into the building but we create a center for arts and culture that actually makes them a programmatic element of a research and teaching support area and so we chose to save that the one that we hated to give up was the faculty innovation in learning and teaching and we we really thought that having them in the building people who were shaping new technology applications for faculty members that we could employ the same technologies that we could use some of the same facility there was a very synergistic possibility and they were the last one we gave up we gave up a number before that to come up with 40 million but we have kept as a partner in the building and it's been crucial to our design from the first the student enrollment services has a major area on the third floor called the student success center and they'll provide the learning resource support and student advising assistance to students with disabilities and what we want is their programs and our programs to be overlaid in such a fashion that in fact that students can't tell whose programs want and that we really really strengthen the support for students success by both those organizations and once again that library facility in more areas that are critical to the success of the university so we've been looking at ways how we can make ourselves crucial the question about the number of staff it's about 236 is the I think is the total number right now and and that doesn't really include all of our contractual relationships with the provincial government and so forth but it does include the things that are central to the operation of this building regarding how money are involved in public services versus the back end of the building operation I'll have to say I don't think about the staffing in that fashion and so I can't give you an exact number and part of that is because of the reorganization which we implemented in 2009 is really being carried out really this year is going to move staff from one area to another it is going to focus more staff on the research areas and trying to promote a new opportunities for us to support campus research and for us to be an instigator of campus research as well on the public service side we do see the change in the pattern of requests at public service points and we do believe that well it's really clear you don't have as many questions and they're not as complex as they used to be so in fact we need to devote more of those resources in ways that as Shauna describes the collaborative work rooms that they can manage their own use of the spaces but also their own use of the services so we're kind of in the process of rewriting of that area I think it will be you know I think we'll be well into 2012 before we really get all of the necessary adjustments on the other hand when we started doing the strategic study we thought on day one we thought we were designing for the building but very soon we realized that it actually was a realignment that was really about the nature of 21st century services and that the building was a match with that but that the building wasn't driving it that those were things we should be doing changes we should already be making of our own accord but that we'd be able to realize them through the vehicle or the building you talked about the importance of this being a student centered design effort rather than a librarian centered effort could you talk a little bit about how you involved the students what kind of methods you used to get them involved in the process I knew I was going to get that question as Tom had mentioned we did those six teams and some of the interviews that we did did include students I am the liaison with our students union so I did keep in close touch with both the president and the VP academic with some of the decisions that were made and I remain in contact with them to help students drive decisions through the building we had several variables that prevented us from maybe doing as extensive collaboration and work with the students as we would like to obviously there's all the work done by Susan Gibbons and the Ohio reports and Joan Lippincott that discusses integrating students with your planning and design and we are certainly supportive of that and I think if we could do it over again we would maybe try and control those variables more to include student response but it we did try, we really did and maybe moving forward we have discussed amongst librarians that we can involve students and maybe once the building is up and running and we had a few semesters under our belt discussing with the students how we can shape it I think Susan Gibbons had a great idea she asked students to take pictures of their favorite spots in the building and that will give us information in areas not to change and also where in the building they feel lost and that will really help us identify those spots that need fixing I think Shana is correct in describing the challenges of meaningful student involvement but I also want to say that the relationship with the student government is a terrifically strong one and I've never seen a student the undergraduate student government receives from the Board of Governors a large body of money each year and they choose what they want to spend it on and what they think is critical to student success and they have always chosen various projects in the library the media area that Shana described they gave us $165,000 to support that out of the funds they have so we have a very close and tight relationship and my favorite award that we've received since I've been there is that last year we won the student president's award for our lead contribution to student success so even though getting the kind of involvement we would like is challenging we do have a rich relationship and we just need to take advantage of it going forward I think that's probably it I think it's 6 o'clock it may be serving through let's go