The Library Of the Future THE MILLION MONOGRAPH MARCH

QUOTE/UNQUOTE "Instead of making books the center of the library, Berry puts users at the center." JOHN CRANE, LIBRARY BUILDING COMMITTEE CHAIR

SINCE 1928 BAKER LIBRARY HAS combined the best attributes of grand public architecture with the Colleges need to warehouse an ever-growing collection of books. Today the main lobby of Baker still contains a card catalog, even though it hasn't been updated in nearly a decade. The message is clear: Books rule.

The main level of the new Berry Library, slated to open September 19 after two years of construction, telegraphs an entirely different message. "Instead of making books the center of the library, Berry puts users at the center," says John Crane '69, chair of the library building committee. To illustrate his point, Crane displays the buildings blueprints. In contrast to Baker and its drawers of cards, scholars walking to Berry's main level will find an entire floor of information experts. The reference desk, the curricular computing department, the computer help desk, the library circulation desk, the interlibrary loan office, the government documents desk and two information desks are conveniently grouped so that patrons can tap human expertise before hitting the stacks or cyberspace for the information they need.

Chief architect Geoff Freeman, of the Boston firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, sees the integration of libraries and computing services as the wave of the future. Dartmouth is a leader in bringing together these two increasingly related professions into one building, according to Freeman. "We know the direction that learning and the use of information technology is moving in, and that is toward the delivery of information from a single source," he says. Increasingly, as time becomes critical, the completion of a research project without having to go from building to building becomes a value-added asset to the institution.

The new, $38 million building is designed to evolve. That's because no one knows the long-term demands that students, faculty and technology will place on Berry in the next half century. Planners drew inspiration from, appropriately enough, a book: How Buildings Learn:What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand. "Brand argues that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong," says Crane. As a result, the interior of the six-story, 153,000-square-foot library has no load-bearing walls. Fifty-four years from now, when this year's freshmen return for their 50th reunion, the inside of Berry may have a wholly different configuration—not a possibility with Baker's foot-thick interior walls.

Berry's September opening marks the second of several milestones in the transformation of Dartmouth's libraries. (The first was the opening of the Rauner Special Collections Library in Webster Hall in 1998.) Still in the works are the razing of Kiewit Computation Center to make room for the addition of another wing to Berry, as well as the renovation of Bakers interior. When the dust finally settles, the College will celebrate with a formal dedication ceremony sometime in 2002.

Moving to Berry, the library of the 21st century, involves plenty of old-fashioned sweat equity. Baker Library will suspend normal operations for about three weeks at the end of summer term so that a million books—as well as magazines, videotapes, newspapers and microfilm—can be removed from the old building and rearranged onto 20 miles of new shelving in Berry. A professional library-moving firm, Library Relocation Consultants, supplies the brains, and a small army of students furnishes the brawn. The library expects normal business to resume, albeit in a new setting, by Convocation on September 19.

Moving a million books isn't as simple as carting them from one building to another. Some shelves are intentionally left empty to allow for growth in the collection. "During the past three years we've measured the collection three times to estimate the rate of growth," says Pam Ploeger, the circulation services librarian. But the problem is that growth isn't constant across the collection. "An event in history, like the fall of the Soviet Union or war in Bosnia, can trigger sudden dramatic growth," Ploeger says. "You never know when that might occur."

Man with the Plans John Crane,chairman of the building committee.