Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 44)

m m access it 24 hours a day, seven days a week from their dorm rooms.” top right: Students seekA recent addition to Lehigh’s ing solitude can ﬁnd refuge in many hidden digital library is The Vault at Pfaff’s, nooks and crannies. a database of works of lesser-known bottom right: Almost imwriters who hung out with Walt mediately, the students Whitman at a bohemian bar in New reclaimed the renovated library. York City called Pfaff’s. bottom left: The design on “We have started collecting the rotunda’s glass wall is these works and Lehigh faculty inspired by the ironwork and students have been studying on the spiral staircase. these writers’ interactions with Whitman and how they inﬂuenced him,” Citak says. The renovated Linderman now sports its own bohemian hangout in Lucy’s Café, the small coffee and sandwich shop nestled on the ground level of the building. Now, instead of walking to the UC to grab a snack or coffee, students can stay in the library. They can set up their books, go to class, come back, grab a box of sushi, and keep studying. In addition, Lucy’s offers a more casual place for them to interact with fellow students and professors. “Before Lucy’s, there really wasn’t a place on campus where both students and faculty hung out,” Taggart says. “But now there will hopefully be a serendipitous interaction between the two.” Wojciechowski’s class waited the longest to see Linderman, but it was worth it. “Linderman is tailored to the needs of the modern student, from computing to comfort to caffeine,” he says. top left: Whether it’s sitting at a table or lounging on a window, the library accommodates all learning styles. Linderman Renewed [ Tran#formation\ ∑ With the renovation and preservation of Linderman Library also came a transformation in its usage. “We have taken a pretty much straightforward legacy humanities library and given it aspects of teaching, learning, socialization, and presentation,” Taggart says. Scheler adds: “While students always used and loved Linderman, it is much more user-friendly now. The restoration has recaptured so much space and made Linderman so much more accommodating.” Two of the major sea changes in learning and libraries that helped determine the kinds of renovations that were done are shared learning and digitization. “The students have changed their use of the library over the years, and the big, big change is that the academic curriculum is more collaborative,” Cady says. “There is more of an emphasis on team projects, and learning is social in a way that it has never been before.” To accommodate the shift, the Linderman renovations include ﬁve group study rooms separated from the rest of the common study areas, 15 informal group study alcoves and tables in the café, as well as almost 200 new seats scattered throughout to allow more students to sit together to cooperate and learn. The Heart & Soul of Lehigh Memories But Linderman is more than just wonderful spaces and important book collections. It’s also the people who work there. Service and help desk staff and student assistants answer basic library and computing questions, while the humanities librarian and computing consultants deal with more in-depth problems and also teach classes and seminars in the 24-seat computing classroom. Meanwhile, the digital library group and the library technical services team perform the many behind-the-scenes operations that enable the library to offer high-quality print and electronic resources for faculty and students. Although the new Linderman has received rave reviews from Lehigh students, faculty, staff, and alumni, those involved admit there were some tense moments. “When you walked through here halfway through the project, this place looked like a tobacco barn,” Taggart says. “It was gray and dusty and lights were hanging, and all you heard were jackhammers … and there were backhoes in the basement! It is amazing how well it came together.” President Alice P. Gast, who personally greeted the ﬁrst-arriving visitors when Linderman reopened its doors in March, praised all those who worked so hard to make the historic project such a success. “This important transformation was made possible through Linderman in the Digital Age Another major change is the way that students access books and journals. Lehigh has put many of its rare books on the Web so that anyone on or off campus can look at them. “Digital projects have helped us share our unique special collections with the rest of the world and add to Lehigh’s prestige along the way,” Black says. “And it also allows our students to ‘handle’ rare materials in a way they couldn’t before.” For example, a digital copy of Copernicus’s Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, published after the revolutionary scientist died in 1543, is now available online. “The copy we have contains marginalia, and one student assignment involved ﬁguring out who wrote that marginalia and what it meant,” Ilhan Citak, special collections librarian, says. “In the past, the students would have had to view the book for the assignment in Special Collections only, but now they can also 44 lehigh alumni bulletin

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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