Coming Soon To A Bally’s Ballroom Near You
Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, Netherlands (Firm: MVRDV)
It’s cold, high, sustainable, and purpose-built. It’s digital, globalized, aggregated, and
collaborative. It’s timeless, symbolic, responsive, and emergent. If this sounds like the tagline
for a special collections and archives summer blockbuster, you may be right! Our closing
plenary features a marvelous trio of speakers who will transform our ideas surrounding
preservation, digital, and architectural design, from the concrete to conceptual. What expert
guidance and insight can RBMS-goers expect? Here’s a sneak preview…
Jim Reilly (Rochester Institute of Technology) will offer the latest preservation strategies—
new approaches to collections care that strike a sensitive balance between cost-effective,
life-extending, high-capacity storage solutions with the ongoing need for symbolic, uplifting
public spaces that, in his words, send “a strong message of dignity and importance” around
an institution’s overall brand. Jim will invite us to consider the persuasive evidence related to
sustainable construction, and compel us to justify our emblematic physical presence.
High-bay storage Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
University of Virginia University of Pennsylvania (Firm: Gensler)
Emily Gore (Digital Public Library of American) will help us visualize a viable model for
delivering digital and born-digital content from a multitude of sources through one access
point on DPLA. She leads the Digital Hubs Pilot Project, which is building a nationwide
network of Content Hubs (digital records providers) and Service Hubs (state and regional
hosts) that are creating a powerful conduit for cultural heritage institutions of all types and
sizes to share their standardized data throughout the world. Emily will illustrate what digital
place means in this time of accelerated openness and necessary cooperation.
Digital Hubs – Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Shannon Mattern (The New School) will share her latest research about the intersections
between media and space, exploring effective library designs that create new frameworks
for our evolving programs. “Libraries have continuously reinvented the means by which
they provide those timeless information services,” she has said, suggesting that libraries have
always “been an emergent informational and social infrastructure.” So what can libraries and
archives do to create new physical infrastructures that are responsive to our shifting roles.
BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas (Firm: Muñoz & Company)
My library at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has just completed a series of vision-building
sessions with architects, so moderating this panel couldn’t come at a better time. We’re
embarking on a remodel that will give our architecture collections, artist books, and oral
histories not just a chilly place to reside, but a new spatial context—one that is open, flexible,
and tech-tool enriched; a sort of laboratory for faculty and student-driven engagement,
examination, research, visualization, and presentation that’s at the heart of our polytechnic
identity. We’re creating one floor where Special Collections and Archives will share physical
adjacencies with our digital repository and digital scholarship, as well as the GIS/data studio,
intentionally linking the rare and unique with a host of digital resources that loop back to
library-based instruction efforts.
I can’t wait to receive next-generation wisdom from our Space/Place-Team: Jim, Emily, and
Shannon. Vegas—that urban-planning shape shifter that is always retrofitting our notions
about leisure, entertainment, recreation, commerce, and culture—it couldn’t be a more
fitting venue to explore the evolving purpose and meaning of place. We’ll see you at RBMS!
Jessica Holada, moderator
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