MBU’s Library Getting Full Wall-to-Wall Renovation

“One of the things that is changing rapidly in higher education is library space. Students learn differently now,” said Dr. Keith Ross, university president. “I’m a book person anyways, so I like books, but what we found out is that a great number of the volumes we have there haven’t been checked out in years.”

The way that students learn is rapidly changing, and professors and other educators have begun to notice.

The Library Task Force, a group of faculty and staff members from MBU who are studying what students need in their new library, are asking students, looking at other university libraries and researching studies on the new era of students.

“It [the new library space] would represent a new era of intellectual engagement for Missouri Baptist University. Research has shown that more people, students and professors research online and frequently work in groups. The renovation would allow for both social and study spaces,” Amanda Staggenborg, assistant professor and undergraduate communications instructional coordinator, and a member of the Library Task Force, said in an email.

In the fall semester of 2016, once the decision was made that the library was indeed getting a renovation, Ross began looking at his options, dollar-wise.

“We approached a donor and said, ‘Hey if we could do this, would you be interested?’ We have a substantial lead gift that will help us with this. We still need to do some additional fundraising. When we got that gift we knew we could start moving forward with some ideas,” Ross said.

The preliminary total cost of the project is approximately $1.2 million and the lead gift totaled $500,000. The donor, at this time, will remain anonymous, Ross said.

Next, Ross began the journey by taking university vice presidents with him to visit William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, to look at their Pryor Learning Center, a building that contains innovation and active learning spaces, which is where a lot of MBU’s ideas came from.

“We were seeing where there’s new, different, innovative collaborative learning environments. Many of them were associated with schools moving away from the traditional library,” said Ross.

A non-traditional library is going to contain more technology, private rooms for groups of students to work together, and some creative spaces in general.

“We were excited to see the best practices in library technology at Maryville University and Lindenwood University. People were not simply retrieving information but socializing, researching and supporting students in collaborative hubs,” Staggenborg said in an email. “Lots of open spaces and study areas, nooks and ground-floor cafes. But almost every seat was occupied, which was inspiring.”

After viewing Maryville and Lindenwood’s libraries, the Library Task Force had a more clear understanding of what elements in Jung-Kellogg need updating.

“The library renovation itself is wanting to focus on creating more collaborative study spaces for students, kind of thinking how our library space is being used,” said Jeanna Ryner, director of library services at MBU from February 2016 to August 2018. “We aren’t looking to build on to the building at all, we are looking at just the existing floor plan as it is and how can we repurpose that for our students in the coming years.”

One of the first steps of beginning the renovation is clearing some of the current space to make room for new elements such as more group working stations, “living-room-like” spaces, and small, closed-off rooms for collaborating.

“Part of the project itself is a large space for a reclamation project, so we need space, to create space for the students. A big part of this project is that space reclamation effort and for the library what that means is that we are looking at downsizing our print collection by about 70 percent,” Ryner said last year during the project’s beginning.

Rebekah McKinney, current director of library services, said the library staff began removing books from the physical circulating collection in May 2018 and are now nearing completion of that effort.

This physical circulating collection contains the books that are currently in the library and available for checkout.

On a daily basis, McKinney said library staff members are working diligently at checking and removing items from their physical circulating collection in a timely manner.

“I am also looking forward at the other collections that must be downsized in order to create the maximum amount of space for the renovation,” McKinney said.

When deciding what to keep and what to remove from the library, the Library Task Force is focusing on which books regularly circulate and which books haven’t been checked out in years. Items that are outdated or have not circulated at all will no longer have a place in the library, officials said.