Media Contact:
David Hiscoe, NCSU Libraries,  (919) 513-3425

The North Carolina State University Libraries has received a $313,000 grant to develop a roadmap for how twenty-first century libraries can best give a competitive edge to faculty, researchers, graduate students and a new generation of always-connected, technology-savvy, and highly-engaged undergraduates. Enabled by the generous support of a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the NCSU Libraries will lead a collaborative project to prototype, develop, and disseminate plans for how mobile technologies, gesture-based computing, large scale visualization, enhanced reality and other emerging technologies can help academic libraries create the next generation of technology-rich collaborative learning spaces.

Since the 1990s, as personal computing geared up and universities discovered how group work can enable learning and prepare students for today’s collaborative working world, the “learning commons” has revolutionized the library experience. The NCSU Libraries has been at the fore of this transformation. The 2007 launch of the D. H. Hill Learning Commons has transformed the campus libraries into vibrant hubs of activity, where students gather to work through assignments, test out ideas with their peers, and work with the iPads, graphics tablets, laptops, and other technology devices they borrow over 100,000 times a year from the library. The Learning Commons is in large part responsible for the up to 16,000 daily visits the Libraries receives and for students insisting that the library space is their most valuable resource on campus. The NCSU Libraries Learning Commons has, in fact, become an international destination, with visits from over seventy-five groups from seventeen states and eleven countries.

The IMLS grant recognizes the leadership that the NCSU Libraries has provided in developing new learning spaces and charges the Libraries and its collaborators in the project to develop a blueprint for the next generation of learning commons, one that fosters the interaction, iteration, and invention that technology enables.

This project to explore and create technology-rich learning environments will develop a three-part model that can be adopted and adapted by academic libraries everywhere. The “kit of parts” will provide a set of proven configurations and services that can be used to create successful technology-rich spaces in libraries and other campus facilities.  The “assembly instructions” will provide guidance on how the parts work together to complement each other and meet the needs of a particular institution. The “roadmap” will lay out the design process that an institution would use to create learning environments.

The model will be based on user-centered research that will explore the real-world needs of students and faculty, the challenges they face in meeting those needs on campus, and how spaces, services and technology can help meet those needs. The study will investigate how today’s learners want to create and display content, use labs and studio spaces as catalysts for group work, and experiment with new teaching techniques and visualization technologies to incubate more powerful ways to learn.

“The D. H. Hill Learning Commons has transformed the NCSU Libraries and given us so much experience in how great spaces can transform the lives of students who learn here,” says Susan Nutter.  “It’s been incredibly fun and energizing for me, my staff, and the university as a whole.  We are incredibly proud to be chosen to carry the torch for the next generation of learning commons.”

The NCSU Libraries will partner in this two-year project with NC State University’s Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) group and with DEGW, an international strategic business consultancy that specializes in how the design of physical and virtual spaces helps people and organizations better perform.  The prototypes for next generation learning commons will be built and tested in the Technology Sandbox, a technology incubator now being built adjacent to the D. H. Hill Learning Commons. The Technology Sandbox is supported by grant funds from IMLS awarded earlier this year under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources. Early results from the grant work will also be deployed to help make the iconic new James B. Hunt Jr. Library, now under construction on NC State’s Centennial Campus, the best learning and collaboration space in the nation.

IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.  According to IMLS Acting Director Marsha L. Semme, National Leadership Grants “provide opportunities to conduct research and develop the framework for future projects that have the potential to generate new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances that will positively impact museums, libraries, and the communities they serve. These projects encourage partnerships that address national issues of importance impacting education, scholarship, and public service.”

Media Contact:
David Hiscoe, NCSU Libraries,  (919) 513-3425

The North Carolina State University Libraries announced today that it will join a partnership with Duke University Libraries and select research libraries from around the country to develop the next generation of software to manage the collections of tomorrow’s academic libraries. The Kuali OLE partnership—led by Indiana University and funded by a $2.38 million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—will bring together a community of academic libraries that want to change the way that information is managed in an increasingly digital environment. The project will develop community source software that will meet the needs of the next-generation of researchers and will be made available to libraries worldwide.

Large academic research libraries manage and provide access to millions of items and use software to track many interrelated transactions, from ordering and paying for these items to loaning them to library patrons. The systems currently in use to catalog and track these transactions are largely based on the print collections of the past.  But today’s research library collections are rapidly evolving to include increasingly diverse digital materials ranging from leased electronic journals to digitized photograph collections. Tomorrow’s management software must accommodate and leverage these fundamental changes.

“Research libraries are in dire need of systems that can support the management of research collections for the next-generation scholar,” says Robert McDonald, executive director for the project and associate dean for library technologies at Indiana University. “This approach demonstrates the best of open-source software development, community-directed partnership resource needs, and a market of commercial support providers to truly align with the needs of research libraries within the higher education environment.”

We are delighted to be a part of this great project,” announced Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of the NCSU Libraries.  “The NCSU Libraries has always been comfortable at the pioneering edge of the digital library, and we are most happy to lend our expertise in this next large step forward.”

More than 200 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations, and businesses laid the groundwork for this initiative by participating in the Open Library Environment (OLE) (pronounced Oh-LAY) project, which was supported by an earlier planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University. Based on the broad insight gained by OLE, work will now begin to create a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows and reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work.

In November the Kuali Foundation, a community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain community-source software for higher education, announced its partnership in the project. The initiative now funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is known as the Kuali OLE project.

The NCSU Libraries will join with Duke University to represent the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) in the partnership. Other Kuali OLE partners include Indiana University (lead); Florida Consortium (University of Florida representing Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida, the Florida Center for Library Automation); Lehigh University; University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.