Drinko Library Description

The John Deaver Drinko Library creates an environment where students, faculty, staff and the community can join with colleagues beyond the campus, developing and testing new versions of the learning community, exploring teaching, research, service, collaboration, and other areas. Our patrons can blend the traditional library/information resources with global electronic multimedia materials. Even more importantly, the John Deaver Drinko Library fosters a new spirit of excitement and adventure. It provides the foundation for a learning culture, where students and faculty are strongly encouraged to "actively question and explore" to expand the learning process as they reach for ambitious goals. Organized around dynamic, integrative themes, the John Deaver Drinko Library unites informational resources into a unified accessible format regardless of media type or location. The Virtual Library Information System is available via the Internet to serve our learning community 24 hours a day.

More specifically, this 118,000 square-foot facility blends traditional with modern architecture to house nearly 200,000 volumes of books, supports almost 300 workstations and notebooks for patron use running on an ultra-fast telecommunications backbone. It has hundreds of network ports for students to plug in their laptops. Students can also borrow laptops from the Study Center and stroll through the facilities, networked training room, distance multimedia presentation room and auditorium, individual and group study rooms, comfortable reading areas, and faculty development rooms.

Perhaps the best way to envision the John Deaver Drinko Library is as a tremendous interactive laboratory for imaginative scholars and students, a place for creativity -- using knowledge to serve our society. All informational resources and tools in the facility are designed for ease of use so they become a natural extension to everyday activity. Planning for this library began more than eight years ago and expanded to teams of information specialists who reviewed and visited the most advanced facilities of our time. These ideas have been blended into a unique informational, technological and collaborative spirit that is displayed in every aspect of this facility. It is ironic that the new paradigm of learning communities, in reality, represents a mechanism to return higher learning to the historic ways of the university, a facility where knowledge and truth are pursued.