It is like clockwork.
Every morning at 7 o’clock, semi tractor-trailer arrives from Wisconsin, filled with shelving. Each truck is unloaded in a few hours and the carriages moved into place. The installation crews assemble the bases and install the uprights.
Yep. Just another summer day at the College of Charleston’s Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library.
Since the end of the school year, the library has been undergoing major renovations. When students come back in the fall, not only will they see more individual and group study spaces and a new Starbucks Coffee Shop, but they will also discover that the library will soon be the new home of the South Carolina Historical Society’s collection of exceptional rare materials.
There will be more seating too. Over 200 more seats will be added to the 1,200 chairs already in the library.
Charging the laptop will be easier. There will be more than 100 power locations sprinkled around the library so you will never have to worry about a tablet or cellphone dying.
Other changes include putting the entire book collection on the second floor, expanding the Special Collections Reading Room and expanding capacity for the library’s unique manuscript and rare book collections.
Most of the current renovations have been taking place on the 2nd and 3rd floors where the new mobile shelves are being installed. After the instillation, workers will than spend many hours returning more than 750,000 books back on the new shelves.
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Dean of Libraries John White says the new renovations will help the library continue to grow.
“The new flexible classroom is an inviting space that can be used as a high tech classroom or open study space and the high efficiency shelving gives us room to grow the print collection for the foreseeable future. Most important, our partnership with the South Carolina Historical Society more than doubles the number of unique manuscripts available in the building — making the Addlestone Library a premiere research destination for the study of the Carolina Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the Atlantic World.”
The Addlestone Library opened to students on the first day of spring semester, January 17, 2005. The building is three stories high and 145,000 sq. ft. – approximately the size of three football fields stacked on top of each other.
The majority of these new library renovations should be completed by the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year.
