 Hello, I'm Jim Mullins, and I'm the Dean of Libraries at Purdue University. And I'm going to be talking to you a bit today about a new building that we just opened in August called the Wilmets of the Thomas S. and Harvey D. Wilmets Faculty Learning Center. And we think it's something that is very unique in conceptualization of combining both classrooms and the library. And I'll go into a little bit more detail of that first. But first, I'm going to show you some videos. Each year, for about the last four years, Purdue has sponsored, Purdue Libraries sponsors a contest among our students about why do I love Purdue Libraries. And in the past, they do these wonderful videos. And we give out $1,000 as the first prize, $750 for second prize and $500 for third prize underwritten by one of our local banks. And this year, we decided we would change it and it would be the Wilmets Active Learning Center wall. They call it the wall. We weren't quite sure what they were going to call it. We thought maybe Wilmets or the Active Learning Center. But since in the special courses that's abbreviated WALC, they call it the wall. So I'm going to show you the videos that we did. The videos I used in the past in the years to help get support for the libraries by showing it to the trustees, showing it to alumni, and showing it to donors. So I'm going to show you, go ahead. So these are four different videos. College students face the challenge of trying to balance studying, sleep, and socializing. It's been said balancing all three is nearly impossible. But now with the Thomas S. Harvey H. Wilmets Active Learning Center, it's easy. Not only can you study, sleep, and socialize, but the 164,000 square foot facility houses the Library of Engineering and Science and 27 classrooms designed for active learning. Some of the quietest study spots can be found in the library. With individual booths and desk space, it's easy to get studying done. Another great study spot is the Mullins Reading Room. The room is kept quiet for individual study. However, if you have a group project that needs to work with others, there are plenty of collaborative study areas. Wilmets also houses the developed data visualization experience lab with Purdue. Students also have access to computers and printers whenever needed. The building houses many artifacts and pieces of history that can all be learned about on the archives and artifacts audio tour. The tour can be accessed online or through your phone. Site 17, the Wilmets Active Learning Center honors two brothers who earned their engineering degrees at Purdue University. The cafe, library, unique furniture, and study spaces are what make WALC such a great resource for students and faculty. The Wilmets Active Learning Center, or WALC, is a 24-hour second day of recoup for learning, studying, and collaborating with fellow classmates. With student-centered active learning, it's easier than ever to focus on what's important in the classroom. Study in the state-of-the-art grand recoup on the second floor, or try one of the 27 study rooms that are available to reserve online. The Library of Engineering and Science is full of literature, spaces to zone in on work, and plenty of help is available if you have questions. Here, you experience the newest technology with wide desktop computers, easy to use ITEP-printing stations, and convenient tabletop outlets. For activity, the best student you can be in a safe, diverse, friendly, and innovative space. WALC provides access to the resources that will be graduating in four years with a prestigious degree from Purdue University a reality. Music Purdue University is hard. Like, really hard. I'm going to go down just a little. And my favorite place to do that is the Grand Dome. Music You have things like the Library of Engineering and Science is better for instructional excellence. There's so much cool artwork throughout the entire building. You have the best view on campus with so many cool study areas with more computers than you could ever do. Most importantly for college students, you have to. But I feel like the reason that most students would want to do this, and I could have wanted to do this, is because I need to do one thing, and one thing. But there's so many cool places. Thank you. Not for ever getting a screen mark on your projects or study with your friends. Anyway, the very best part of all of your mind opinion is the fact that you can study in complete and utter. That room is absolutely silent. It's incredible. Music We have 24 submissions. I love the atmosphere and scenery and the resources available. That access to information. A lot of great insights. I love the environment that inspires creativity. Design. Success. Emission. Contribute. Walk is a great place to work together. I can work by myself. Walk is perfect for doing a project, homework, or studying. What's not to love about walk? Music Okay, I wanted to show you those videos at the beginning so you could get an idea of the space. I've had various people visit who have seen or heard me talk about it. But until they see it, they can't quite conceptualize it. Because I have to tell people when they come into the building, wherever you see carpet, that's library. Because the library is scattered throughout the entire building. And so the classrooms are adjacent to library spaces and they flow out into the library. And after 530, all of those classrooms are study spaces. So after 530, 164,000 square feet becomes a library, all supervised by the library. Okay. Now I've credited Susie Hudson, who is Assistant Director of Planning, Facilities in Planning and Construction at University of Central Florida. She had been a Purdue and so she went down to Florida and came back up and was taking pictures and she sent me the slide presentation. She did and I said, Susie, these are wonderful slides. Can I use them? And she gave me permission. She said, I'll get it, I'll add it to my CV. Okay. The Consolidate is six of our campus libraries, our science and engineering libraries. We had 16 libraries at Purdue and the majority of them are science and engineering. And so we brought together our science, engineering, chemistry, physics, earth and atmospheric sciences, pharmacy and life sciences. And the gross square feet of the building is 178,000. Science and engineering, assignable to 93,000. The internal staircase takes quite a bit of the available square footage of the building. And I've had students complain about that. But unfortunately, to get people through the building, you do need stairs. The building budget itself was 79 million. 15 million came from the state of Indiana as a cash gift. No bombing. It was a cash gift. 13 million from the university, 16 million from the libraries I had to sign a contract with the president that I would have all of the money in hand before we started the building project. And we did it. Then the university put another 18 million into the surrounding area to finish off the closet. So the entire project was just under 100 million. No debt. The artifacts that you saw the people talked about were from this building. It was built in 1924 power plant. Which at the time it was built was on the north edge of campus. By the time this building was, that we started with our construction, the campus had extended all the way around us. So this power plant was now sitting in the middle of campus. In the 1960s, a new power plant was built on the south side of campus. And in the 1980s, this plant was, as people have fondly called it, produced finger to the world. It was if you saw the picture of the smoke stack or the bell tower, the smoke stack was 60 feet taller than the bell tower. So it was highly visible and so it was the landmark that people used. When they decided to tear it down in the early 90s, tear down the smoke stack, people complained and said, but it's the icon for the university. They said at the time, I don't remember ever seeing any of our stationery or any of our publicity. Instead they built the bell tower. So when the decision was decided that we would tear this building down, I said, and I'm a history buff, I said we have to preserve this building. Building had a very important role by providing heat and electricity for the entire university. The university could not have survived without this. So the building was demolished but we saved elements. We went into it and took the pieces from the building that we thought helped to tell the story. It also served as an active learning center because engineering students in mechanical and civil took classes in there. Faculty took them in and showed them actual operations. So even though we were building an active learning center, we set us on the side of an active learning building. And we have large pictures taken of students and faculty and workers in the building blown up on the walls. You may have seen a couple of them in the slides. Okay. In the videos you may have seen that you can see it in the classrooms. A lot of the classrooms are all glass so that you look into them. That was for two reasons. Active learning requires that students work in teams. And it was to get away from the concept of having students working and listening to professor and not really having the chance to explore the ideas amongst themselves. So about five years ago, six years ago Purdue launched a program called Impact. Construction Matters Purdue Academic Course Transformation because we were dissatisfied with the number of students who were moving from matriculating from first to second year to some of our major courses. We were at an 88% matriculation rate. That was not acceptable to Purdue. We wanted to be closer to 93% to 95% matriculation. And the decision was made of the large lecture classes that was causing this disadvantage for our students. So the intent was to put the lectures online and this was across campus in chemistry, political science, psychology and then to have students working in teams. So that they could help teach each other as well as listen to the professor who was there as a coach. The president of the university Mitch Daniels thinks this is a very, very good way to teach. So he gave us an instruction do not want to walk into the new Women's Active Learning Center and seeing the professor lecture to the class. He wants to see active learning. So he said we need to have class so people can see into it. And that is for those rooms to be study rooms. So that activity can go on in those rooms, students can be studied and we can see in so that they don't feel isolated. We opened the first day of classes this fall. And I happened to not be there. I was in Poland with IPLA. And people started sending me pictures immediately and they said Jim it's full, it's full right away. Students were in there. It sits right in the middle campus as I said and it's on a major thoroughfare. And so the students naturally gravitated towards it. The area that you see on the left side is right inside the front doors. And our assumption was that as people are walking past and they have an hour to spend they'll come in and sit down and stay in the library for a period of time and then leave or if they have a class in the building they'll come down and use it. It has many computers as we had in our six libraries into this building. So this building, even though the students talk about how many computers it has it has no more than the six libraries have themselves. The seating is also similar. The building seats 4000. The light well in the middle of the building we hired a Nancy Friedposter who is an anthropologist. She led a team of people in the libraries to go out and talk to the students in the building and say, what is it that you want to see in this building? What will you want to know? What do you want to be sure is going to be in this building? They had several things that they said they want to see. They wanted to have natural light. They wanted to see out. They wanted to see books. And even though we all know that books are not the heavy issues that are in our libraries they said we want to see books because that helps us know that we're in a library. When the building opened we were curious about how the students would refer to this. Whether they would see this as a library or not. And I've been standing outside sometimes when the students will be giving tours to prospective students and they'll point to it and say, this is our newest library the Wilmeth Active Learning Center. And we still have our Humanities Social Science Education Library which is more or less seen as the Central Library. We also have the In Business Library VetMed Library, Math Library and Aviation Library. The Reading Room. And I will for lack of humility I did take off the mullings in front of this. Susie had mullings on there. Two years ago the President announced at my Dean's Advisory Council meeting that he was naming the Reading Room for me. I was honored and flabbergasted and then I said, and don't tell anyone. Because this was the building was just under construction and this was two years before it was to be completed and I said this is totally inappropriate for this to be known that a room like this was being named for an employee. So for two years it was kept under wraps and it was announced at the dedication of the building. I'm very honored and this is where my retirement reception will be this coming Friday. The Bridge. I think there's a bit of you here. When you're looking at the Reading Room the Reading Room has very traditional finishes in it. More or less artisan crafts, Frank Lloyd Wright. Because there's also a very large reproduction of George Washington crossing the Delaware that the President called me one day and that painting asked to hang in that building. Do you have a place for it? And I thought, oh God. This building was to be high tech. To be all industrial. To reflect the power plant. And I thought how do we put George crossing the Delaware in this ultra tech building? So we then compromised and we said we're going to redo the Reading Room and this artisan crafts Frank Lloyd Wright because it was kind of a happy meeting between the two. And my wife thought it was very odd when she first saw that there's this really very traditional look of Reading Room. On the other side is this ridge that is made out of steel and concrete. More or less to help epitomize Purdue and the engineering function of the University. That's kind of self-explanatory. The chair that the young woman is sitting in we picked those because it was evocative of the smokestack that it was called a slender. And I said, and we have to cover in red so that it's the color of the brick. Well, those of you who are not from Indiana will realize someone at Purdue would not use red. Because that's the IU color. And so I had to say it was a brick red. It's not a crimson. And we had visitors from IU. I'm an IU grad. But we had visitors from IU come up and I was pointing this out to them. And I said, well, this would be like an IU not using black. Since our colors are black and gold. And they said, oh, but we never put black and gold together. So those kinds of strange little the other thing you'll notice is the colors on the furniture all very muted. I don't know if you've worked with but they tend to really like kind of fleshy colors that are very trendy. That in five years everybody's going to say screams mid-twenties. So we kept them very much in the grays and only a little bit of color at some time. The desk there is made out of bricks from the old power plant. And the diameter is the same as the smoke stack. And the grating behind, which looks like you're looking into a boiler is actually from the old smoke stack or from the old power plant. I had not ever been in the power plant until about a year before it was torn down. And a group of us went in so that we could see it. And a group of us were standing way up on top of these grays that you can see down below us. This building about six of us were standing up there and all of a sudden the whole thing kind of shifted. And I turned to this friend of mine. I got a picture of him. He's playing. And I said, you realize we're standing 65 feet above the floor in a building that has not been maintained in 30 years. We got down real fast. But it was this whole thing about trying to incorporate the building. And you'll see up above here. That's one of the murals is on the walls where you see a faculty member a worker in the power plant and students who are learning from the experience of being in the power plant. Okay, these are the classrooms. And as we said, we have 27 classrooms. And the one performance room, the Hyler Theater, seats 329. I had to do a song and dance to the president to get him to accept that as being an active learning space. Because he saw it as a lecture hall. And was really concerned that it was not going to allow students to be able to collaborate. But along with the dance professor and people from Center in Special Excellence, we said active learning takes place in many different ways. And it's not always just people working in teams. We also wanted it for lectures and things in the evening. And it has no stage. It's blacked. So when you look down at it, you feel like you're looking at a stage that you're really not. In order to allow the person in the front of the room to easily move back and forth throughout the room. The Boiler-Up classroom, I'll show you a picture of it. It sees 300. But there are tables that see six. And they even have removable whiteboards where the students can work in teams. But they can also turn and look at the professor. This is the Hyler Theater. You'll see the large windows over here. And when the theater projector comes on, the blinds automatically come down to close off the theater. Or to cut out the sunlight. The building has a lot of glass. A lot of glass. This is the Boiler-Up classroom. You can just barely see that there are some whiteboards hanging down from the ends of the tables. And this room during the day is filled with classes. The faculty love teaching in it. In the evenings you go by and there will be students sitting all throughout the room. More or less like an abbreviated reading room. If this were in a regular classroom building, the students wouldn't be there. When we did the surveys with our students, women especially said we don't feel comfortable in a classroom building at night when there's no supervision. And so this building, we have guards, we have security throughout the building all night. The entire building is 24-7. The I2I classroom is where the students can be facing each other and working together. Six round classrooms. You'll see that some of the tables are fixed. One of our librarians worked very hard on this to come up with the optimal number of seats and configurations so that we can meet the greatest number of needs by our students and our faculty. That's the one thing that we did. We did a trial of this in our undergraduate library. And the thing that we found out was faculty hated tables that they were too movable because when they would leave a class, the last professor would have had it organized one way and by the time the next class gets in there they have to reorganize. So the registrar has to find out what are the specifications or expectations of the professor for the class so they can know which classroom to put them in. The scale up classrooms I think once again, these are movable these are movable tables. And the mobile tablet arm chairs are ones that there's another picture the flexible classrooms where the tables can be moved into different configurations. And then I also wanted to talk about it was also supposed to be talked about by the faculty. And I had our AB person give me a lot of the things that he wanted that he thought other people who were in AB would want to know about. We were very concerned about Wi-Fi saturation in the building and so it was devised for 2.5 devices per person per seat. He now says who would come in with four devices. But I think what it means is to conduit the ability to support that many. I walk through the reading room often times and I just glance to see what students thought. I never I saw a book one day but almost invariably it's no books. And I'll just let you read through that. They also did kind of a scale up all the classrooms do not have to be used. And so our president was very concerned about putting way too much technology in the building that might not be used. And so our IT department went in and scaled up different levels of AB. The wiring and everything is there to be able to take it all in the future. But there was some concern that if we didn't show strong technology or that we had spent money on YC. We do have a maker space in the building. 3D. We also have a vision wall. I gave the team in the libraries who were working on how to demonstrate this very large screen which is six panels, nine panels. And I said I only want to show something that becomes obvious of anybody doing this. Why you need a screen this big. I didn't want to see just a big Excel spreadsheet. I want to see something that a person immediately knows why you have to see something this big. So they did. They worked up a very good demonstration. One of them was they brought up an image and I had the trustees all sitting there. And the image when it first came up looked like a beautiful flower bigger and bigger and bigger. And you realize it was representing all of the connections that the scientists and the researchers had in the Cancer Research Institute. They started showing all of the connections of how they collaborated. And it did a better job of showing that interconnectivity that faculty had in their research than if we had shown a list. Because now they would see a name flow by and they'd go oh there's so and so. And then they would see who he was connected to or she was connected to. It was one of the best examples. Another example was two professors. One professor in theater, dance and another professor in computer graphics. And it showed a young woman dancing at the same time her image was being of the image behind her that was very, very beautiful. And we couldn't have seen that if we were looking at a small screen. Another one was a GIS application about soil degradation in Indiana. Okay, I'm going to go through these real quick. I wonder what happened. Oh, there's one. So you can see that there are classrooms around the edges. But then in the spaces where it says open study, those are library spaces. And basically the students really now see the building as a library. The second floor. The reading room is in the bottom left. The bottom of the center. Although the library faculty for science and engineering, we have 18 library faculty specifically for science and engineering. And they're all located. They have beautiful offices. I make the distinction. I make the decision when I'm taking tours who is on the tour. I don't take other faculty in there. I don't take donors because it's some of the most beautiful views in the building. Looking out onto the bell tower or looking out onto the mall. I definitely don't take other faculty because they would be very jealous. Okay, here's the mobile table chair classroom at the beginning of the day. There it is at the end of the day. And it really allows the professor to create an environment that they want to have the students want to have. And it's a place where the students can put their bags underneath as well. Okay. That's pretty much it. Oh, last thing. We've given a lot of tours of this building. And we've been finding that it's getting more and more difficult to meet the demand that people have asked us to create. So we're planning a forum at Purdue in April of 2018. And so I was giving a preview to this to be watching for it. It'll be minimal registration but it'll be a day and a half. We'll have panels of students, faculty, librarians, architects to really talk about this building. This we now have a $1.5 million endowment for the building. Our goal is to get it up to $5 million. And this is not to support the maintenance or anything. It's to support the replacement of equipment and furnishings as the building ages. Okay. I'm going to stop there and turn to questions and answers. Thank you very much. This is my swan song. I read two weeks, three weeks from the day I'm retired.