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Art & Design School Library Division News

Edited by Elinor Nacheman / Posted: 16 December 2005

Renovations at Decker Library

The Decker Library at Maryland Institute College of Art experienced major renovations during summer 2005. All new shelving has been installed and the stack arrangement revised. With the addition of new furniture, carpeting, and a revised lighting schematic, there's a tremendous improvement in the look and functionality of the library. Space reclaimed for a new Special Collections Room and a Folio Room resulted in an expanded stack capacity of twenty percent. Also completed is the Digital Library space, which will serve as the library's instruction area.

Otis College of Art & Design Wins Grant

The Otis College of Art & Design's Millard Sheets Library was recently awarded a three-year Fletcher Jones Foundation grant to enhance information literacy instruction and the use of instructional technologies at Otis. A rich scope of activities are planned including a brand new Teaching/Learning Center (TLC) for faculty, various types of faculty incentive mini-grants, funding for student teaching assistants to help faculty with creation of learning objectives, and Web enhancements to courses, as well as funding for speakers and consultants on technology and information literacy. Otis chose the DIGI[cation] LS' digital learning system for its course management system. It was successfully soft launched this fall at Otis and, so far, the faculty has been impressed with the system's ease of use and its intuitiveness. Sue Maberry, director of library, gained an additional new title: assistant to the provost for instructional technology.

Columbia College (Chicago) Wins Getty Grant

Columbia College (Chicago) was the recipient of a 2004 Campus Heritage grant from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and awarded $150,000 to undertake the development of a comprehensive Campus Preservation Plan and Historic Building Restoration Guidelines for nine of its buildings in the South Loop area. This eclectic group of buildings constructed between 1886 and 1930 are considered to be of significant historic architectural importance, and their long-term survival is the primary goal of this effort. Funding from the Campus Heritage Grant has supported the historic research and comprehensive evaluation of each building leading to the development of preservation recommendations and determination of the buildings' eligibility for local and national historic designation. The buildings on Columbia College's campus have a rich history. Many were designed by significant architects including William Le Baron Jenney, Christian Eckstrom, and the firm of Holabird and Root. These buildings demonstrate a surprising continuity in the ways they have been used over time. They have housed galleries, a theater, music schools, publishers, recording studios, a progressive social club, and a film distributor. All of these activities are directly or indirectly related to the mission of Columbia College Chicago: to provide innovative educational opportunities in the visual, performing, media and communication arts.

RISD Receives Gorham Gift

The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Library has recently received a significant gift (1300 volumes) originally comprising a part of the Gorham Manufacturing Company's design library. Among the significant items in this archive are design and presentation drawings by some of the company's most important designers. The drawings are now housed in the RISD Museum in support of its collection of Gorham silver. Lenox has generously presented this archive to RISD. The volumes now richly supplement the Gorham patent books already a part of the library's special collections. Lenox has presented another portion of the Gorham archive (early trade and consumer catalogs that document Gorham's product history) to Brown University. The Gorham Company was founded in Providence in 1831 and was an integral part of the city's history for over 170 years. The impetus behind the gifts was to insure that the public would have access to the full range of Gorham's history and its remarkable body of work.

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