While the SMU
community has been using the library since it opened its doors
for Summer Session at the end of July 2005, 24 February 2006
marked the official opening of the Li Ka Shing Library. To
mark the occasion, Dr. Li Ka-shing and Singapore's Minister
Mentor Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, attended the official opening
ceremony at the library while later in the day, the library
hosted an open house for the library and information community
in
Singapore.
As a new
library in a very old profession, we face many challenges in
meeting user needs. Therefore, the library's charge is to
provide access to information rather than create large print
collections. To accomplish this, we need to provide creative
ways to connect our users to resources, hire staff with
subject expertise and other special functional skills, partner
internally with other SMU departments that support technology,
research and teaching and seek out libraries with whom we can
collaborate on reciprocal arrangements.
 Singapore
Management University
Singapore
Management University was conceived by the Singapore
government in 1997 to be Singapore's third university. SMU's
goal is to be different from the two existing universities,
the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang
Technical University (NTU), both in teaching style and fiscal
organization. In 1999, SMU signed a collaborative agreement
with the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania to help
create an American style institution in Singapore. In addition
to offering a versatile model of undergraduate business
education, SMU has positioned itself to be a research as well
as a teaching university. SMU is also a privately run
non-profit university, and its success has led to the
impending privatization of the other two universities.
SMU opened its
doors to its first group of about 300 students in 2000, in a
temporary location on the edge of the Bukit Timah campus. The
campus had previously belonged to Raffles College, the
University of Malaya and the University of Singapore, all
predecessors of the National University of Singapore. SMU took
over the Bukit Timah campus in 2001 and stayed there through
June 2005 when it moved into the city's Bras Basah area.
Occupying a 4.5 hectare area, the new SMU campus has four
schools: Lee Kong Chian School of Business, School of
Accountancy, School of Economics & Social Sciences and the
School of Information Systems. The SMU community has about
3,800 students, 200 faculty and 250 administrative and support
staff. Plans are to grow to a maximum of 6,000 undergraduate
students by 2010 and up to 2,000 graduate students in the
future. Each school has its own building and in the middle is
the Li Ka Shing Library.
Plans
for the new campus
Edward Cullinan
Architects of the UK and KNTA Architects of Singapore won the
bid, over 171 other firms, for the new Singapore Management
University campus, which covered the five buildings on the
Bras Basah campus in the Civic District mentioned above. Cox
Architects and Planners and DEG Architects designed the
Administration Building, on the other side of Bras Basah, on
the same block of Victoria Street as the National Library. The
selection of architectural firms was by international
competition. The competition conditions required all
non-Singapore practices to team up with a local practice. The
jury included Mr. Fumihiko Maki, a world-renowned architect
and experienced international competition juror, Winner of the
Pritzker Prize (1993) and numerous architecture awards,
Principal, Maki & Associates, Japan; Mr. O. Robert Simha,
Director of Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
USA; Associate Professor Milton Tan, Head, School of
Architecture, National University of Singapore; and Mr. Ho
Kwon Ping, Chairman, Singapore Management University Board of
Trustees.
Unveiling of Li ka Shing
Foundation plaque with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and donor
Dr. Li Ka-shing
The winning
firms were appointed in December of 2000 with a completion
date of end of June 2005 for all the buildings to be open for
the 2005 summer session. The total cost for the buildings was
SGD450 million.
All the Bras
Basah buildings, including the library, are designed on the
same principles:
There are also
links to the city's master plan, including a new Bras Basah
MRT station on the future Circle Line, which will connect at
the concourse level under the Library. The concourse connects
the Bras Basah buildings, and has a gym and other spaces for
student activities, a Kopitiam (food court), other shops and
some SMU office space.
All the
buildings are made of stone, glass and metal, to give a sense
of transparency and activity in the city area. All the
buildings also have exterior hanging plants.
Existing rain
trees from Bras Basah Park were removed during construction
and returned to campus sites, with additional trees added for
shading. Saving the old trees, one of which is 21 meters high,
was an important gesture to the community, which was concerned
about losing the park area. The National Parks Board supported
SMU's efforts to preserve the trees. The west side of the
Library faces the Campus Green and the trees.
SMU's
library
From August 2000 until January 2002,
the SMU library was housed in a building on Evans Road,
adjoining the Bukit Timah campus. It then moved into the
library building on the main campus, staying there until the
end of June 2005. The campus is being returned to the National
University of Singapore Law School and the Library will become
the Law School Library
The new SMU Library is named after
Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing, Chairman of Cheung Kong
(Holdings) Limited and Hutchison Whampoa Limited. The Li Ka
Shing Foundation donated an endowment to the library for
collections and to the University for scholarships. More
information about the Li Ka Shing Foundation is available at
their
website.
The library includes four floors
above Level One. Level One serves as a public area, housing
the Visitors' Centre and a few eating and meeting areas. Level
Two, the actual library entrance, has the Course Reserve area,
a cafe, comfortable reading space and a large open area that
is being converted into an experimental collaborative work
space. The library is working with Philips Design to create an
area where students can work in collaborative groups late into
the evening, when the upper level seating and project rooms
are closed off.
|
|
Two Skylights offer natural
lighting among the third to fifth levels
Before any furniture moved into the
building, the 2nd floor of the library was used for the
Appreciation Dinner on 3 June 2005 at which time the keys to
the campus were ceremonially handed over by building
contractor Obayashi Corporation to SMU chancellor Dr Richard
Hu, SMU chairman Mr. Ho Kwon Ping, SMU President, Professor
Howard Hunter and SMU Provost, Professor Tan Chin Tiong The
site proved so successful as a formal dinner space that it was
used again for the grand opening of the campus on 20 January
2006, a function attended by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
The space was used yet again for the Official Opening of the
Li Ka Shing Library. It has even recently been used for the
campus-wide blood drive. Emptying the room of all of its
furniture provided the impetus to make changes to the study
space.
Level Three is the reference and
research area, with the Library's small print collection of
periodicals, local company annual reports, and reference
materials. The focus of the area is the 20 computers which
house the special, in-house applications, such as Bloomberg
and DataStream. Level Three also houses all library staff. The
office area has natural window lighting and a view facing
south toward Raffles Convention Centre, the Cathedral, and
Suntec City in the distance. Public seating on this and all
the upper floors is generally traditional, using long, wired
tables. However, there is a lounge area on the third floor and
some additional soft seating interspersed. Levels Three to
Five also house over 30 bookable project rooms, officially
seating 3 to 6 students. Level Four houses the slowly growing
collection of circulating print materials and general
computers in addition to individual carrel spaces for students
looking for quiet spaces to study.
The fifth level is a potpourri of
spaces. A room previously designated as The Reading Room, with
a smaller, glassed inner reading room, leads to the balcony
and has furniture that is easily movable. This has turned into
a popular space for campus wide events, such as book launches,
talks with ministers, and student sponsored performances. Also
on this level is a library classroom for hands on instruction,
with twenty computers, and seating for about 30. The room has
state-of-the-art equipment, including double screen
projection, which is extremely useful for library training.
This enables the trainer to project a PowerPoint and live
research examples simultaneously, using either the web or the
documents camera.
The Center for Teaching and
Learning, which directs the course management software (WebCT)
initiatives with faculty, is located on this floor along with
the Course Support Services (course materials for students),
which was recently incorporated into library activities. The
Center for Academic Computing, supporting individual faculty
research using data, is also moving into the fifth level
space. Having these faculty research and teaching initiatives
in the Library creates a synergy among the academic support
services which should lead to an improved infrastructure and
service for faculty research and teaching.
Students studying with their
laptops
The four floors together comprise
about 11,000 square meters of space and about 8,800 square
meters of public space. Seating is currently for 1,200
students and the library has been averaging more than that
number per day since it opened. Like all buildings on campus,
SMU security cards are required to both enter and leave the
library building.
All the campus buildings are
wireless, although the library also has wired connections. The
library is foregoing reconnecting the Ethernet ports in the
new collaborative area to allow for more flexibility of the
furniture. The library and the university also decided against
creating either a computer lab or information commons within
the library. All local students are strongly encouraged to
have their own laptops and bringing them to campus. It is
primarily the international degree and exchange students who
use library computers regularly. While this decision was
originally uncomfortable for someone like me who is used to a
large information commons, there are certain advantages to
maintaining a stable of only fifty machines.
Library management
In September 1999, the National
Library Board, NLB and SMU signed a memorandum of
understanding for NLB to provide the management of library
services for SMU. The initial contract ran for five years
during which time all library operations were outsourced to
NLB. In 2005, SMU hired a consultant to make recommendations
about the library as it moved into its second five years and
into its new building. The recommendation was for SMU to hire
its own University Librarian. As a result of the consultant's
recommendation, I was hired by SMU last February and took over
the University Librarian position in mid-June 2005. I found
myself in the most enviable position for a librarian; I was
moving into a spacious, open, cheerful new building; I had not
had to endure any of the inherent challenges of working with
architects or builders; and the NLB staff had planned the
entire migration.
The author meets with the Dean of
Students and Director of Student Life
We are entering an interesting phase
in library management. SMU has sole authority for the library;
however part of the onsite staff is directly hired by SMU and
part of the staff is seconded by NLB to SMU, with the advice
and consent of SMU. During this transition period, both
librarians and library workers could be employed by either
organization. However, from a workflow perspective, and more
importantly, a customer service perspective, we want our
internal organizational mix to be transparent to our users.
All librarians have a primary functional responsibility, such
as coordinator for instruction and training, systems
development and coordination, circulation and customer service
and databases and licensing. However, they are all also
expected to serve at our new Information Services Desk
(reference desk) and provide user orientation and instruction.
While this seems commonplace in many libraries, these services
had not been offered prior to the end of 2005 at SMU. We are
experimenting with migrating some of NLB's offsite processes
onsite and looking to other third party vendors, primarily
book jobbers, to offer some shelf-ready services as well. The
primary goal, for both SMU and NLB, is to find the processes
and balance that will allow us to become an excellent academic
research library.
The Library looks forward to its
second five years as a time to strengthen its infrastructure
and leverage its spacious building and central location on
campus to be the intellectual and learning centre for the
University providing products and services that anticipate our
user needs. With its central location in Singapore, it would
like to become a major player in creating a cooperative
reciprocal library environment in Singapore.
"I would like this library to be
seen as the intellectual hub and a centre for research for
faculty; as a place for students to come and collaborate." (MM
Lee opens Li Ka Shing Library at SMU campus Channel NewsAsia
February 24, 2006 Friday, available in LexisNexis and Factiva)
Ruth A. Pagell, is the
University Librarian, Li Ka Shing Library, Singapore
Management University and has been a valued contributor to
ACCESS for many years.
|
