Office of the Associate Vice President for university libraries
The Heart of the Campus Project
Overview
The Heart of the Campus initiative integrates the response to several strategic possibilities for the use of campus land and facilities to achieve near and longer-term university programmatic objectives. At the core of this effort is the desire to transform the character of the physical experience of being a member of the UB community. This project will invent a new and more encompassing concept of the library; will celebrate the cafe, the plaza, the lounge, the corridor as places to relax, talk with colleagues and to learn in a manner different than in a classroom; will recognize that the public realm needs care and imaginative accoutrements because this community spends more time while on campus in the public realm than in any other place; will explore the many ways in which the campus living environments and learning environments spill into each other every moment and make or hinder a sense of real campus community; will be attentive to improving the inter and intradisciplinary interactions that define the intellectual vibrance of the academic community.
For this effort to be successful, campus leaders must think beyond their unit affiliations and past modes of thought and explore together new ways to use campus facilities to create new and exciting and needed places. At the outset, the library faculty and library professionals and the staff of the computing and information technology organization have demonstrated this leadership in their recognition that significant amounts of library space and the computing center building will be utilized in different ways than in the past. This project is indebted to their extraordinary attitude and all who benefit from the final outcomes of this project should see these decisions on the part of these units as enabling their success and the overall impact of this entire effort.
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