The Librarian as Social Architect: Creating a Community for Learning and Research at the Dana Library at Rutgers-Newark

Abstract

Academic library facilities planning in the current climate of rapid technological change and severe economic constraint is a difficult process that generally begins with and builds on a needs assessment and prioritization of concerns. The process requires spatial thinking about adjacencies and proximities and administrative and functional efficiencies, and is based on a series of projections and estimations of growth and change in resources and information services. The difficulty of these considerations notwithstanding, the most critical aspect of the planning challenge is, however, an underlying conceptual one—the understanding and anticipation of the programmatic and related user needs of the campus and the broader community and the way that the library is able to respond to these needs and shape its programs accordingly. In effect, the library uses the medium of architecture to express the nature of its relationships with its constituencies. When viewed from this perspective, the challenge presents the opportunity to create an environment for learning and research that reflects the library's values and beliefs and that gives a clearer focus to its educational role. The challenge is energizing and enabling, and librarians who are engaged in the process have the opportunity to become, in a sense, social architects who can translate their vision of what they believe the library is or can be into a new social reality. The John Cotton Dana Library of the Rutgers University Libraries, in Newark, has had the opportunity to create the kind of library environment that it sought for its campus and community (within, of course, the restrictions of an extremely tight construction budget) in the planning for a two-story addition to and renovation of its facility during the past few years. (It has been at its present site since 1967 with a new wing added in 1977.) The Dana Library is an integral part of the