Have any one of a dozen different kinds of seats at the new Sawyer Library that Williams College will dedicate on Saturday afternoon.

 

There are benches and bean bags, high chairs and hassocks, straight back chairs and wing wingback chairs. There are yellow chairs, gray chairs, red chairs, green chairs and  — this being Williams — purple chairs.

 

And almost all of those chairs are positioned to take advantage of the natural light that floods into the college's main library.

 

"The books don't need the view, right?" jokes Director of Libraries David Pilachowski.

 

Pilachowski has presided over a reported $86 million renovation and construction project that replaces the "old" Sawyer Library and rejuvenates historic Stetson Hall, which, in addition to housing Williams' Chapin Library or Rare Books and College Archives, takes center stage as the entry way to "new" Sawyer.

 

Sawyer's users for decades to come will benefit from a design plan that puts the users first.

 

"In planning this building, we planned a couple of things," Pilachowski says from his corner office on the fourth floor. "One is to be sure we don't compromise the quality of user space. So we have pulled the collection together in ways that are logical and make it easier to find material. The flow is more logical.

 

"We have half the collection — percentage-wise in terms of the number of books — on compact shelving. So it's a mixture of compact and regular shelving."

 

Compact shelving — stacks on tracks — allows Sawyer to hold the same number of books in significantly less space. An easy-to-turn mechanism can move shelves to and fro to create aisles between shelves when needed or butt shelves up against one another when the aisles are not needed.

 

"We have the seating around the edges so that people get the view," Pilachowski said.

 

"And we've segregated the active teaching, active learning areas at the south end of the building with the book stacks in between so it's going to be quieter on the edges. Areas where there will be talking and engagement are isolated from [single seats and study carrels]."

 

Pilachowski said the old Sawyer Library was not nearly as user friendly.

 

"If you had gone into the main part, you would have seen a space that was very crowded," he said. "In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, there was a lot of focus on building collections. That's what libraries do: build collections. But we ended up favoring collections at the expense of reader space.

 

"So we ended up with reader space that was more compressed. And in fact we lost 25 percent of the seats in Sawyer over its lifespan."

 

That should not happen at the new Sawyer — partly because of design elements and partly because of the changing nature of libraries.

 

"We see, longer term, a hybrid world in which both [print and electronic] formats are important," Pilachowski said. "So in designing this building, we have the capacity if we need to add compact shelving and add print books.

 

"We have the capability to reduce the ranges of shelves and increase people space. So we can go in either direction. That kind of flexibility is important."

 

Pilachowski said the college looked long and hard at renovating and expanding the old Sawyer Library. But such a project would have cost about as much as the new build without the benefits.

 

Plus a renovation on a working library would have made operations in the facility "a nightmare," he said.

 

"That's not to say it wasn't inconvenient and noisy to have a major construction project in the middle of campus, but it meant we could fairly seamlessly transition to the new library," he said. "We had to close for a month as the collection was moved. We chose the middle of the summer, and people made use of the Schow Science Library. People discovered it and really liked it, and they should. It's a beautiful space.

 

"But the amount of disruption to people's study and research was minimized because we could stay in old Sawyer -- except for that month in the summer."

 

The old Sawyer Library likely will be demolished next summer, Pilachowski said. The college has engaged a landscape architect to help design the new green that will be bordered by Stetson, Hollander and Schapiro Halls and the Paresky Student Center.

 

In addition to housing Williams' collection of books, journals and other media, the new Sawyer also is home to the college's new Center for Educational Technology, which includes a student help desk and most of the school's IT department.

 

The new Stetson-Sawyer complex includes 16 group rooms of varying sizes to accommodate collaboration and discussion in privacy, three classrooms and three instruction rooms that allow librarians to facilitate research projects of classes normally held elsewhere on campus.

 

"These instruction sessions are individualized to the subject matter of the course," Pilachowski said. "In most cases, it's a single session in the library, but increasingly, we're having faculty wanting two or three sessions over the course of a semester as their students work through different projects."

 

The old Sawyer had two such instruction rooms that were retrofitted spaces with more limited technological capacity. The old facility had no actual classrooms that drew students for regular class meetings throughout the semester.

 

"We're trying to support the teaching mission of the library," Pilachowski said. "We certainly support research, but teaching is something that is central to what Williams is all about."

 

All the new technology and new construction links in a significant way to Williams' past.

 

Stetson Hall, built in 1920, not only received a facelift, it has been joined to the new library by a large atrium. Although the Chapin Library and College Archives were always a short walk from the Old Sawyer (until Stetson was closed for renovations, that is), they were not part of the main library until now.

 

"[Old] Sawyer was across the plaza," Pilachowski said. "We would refer people back and forth, but it wasn't the same as saying, 'Take that stairway there, take a right when you get off the stairs and you're in this gallery space."

 

And speaking of stairways, a large floating staircase that is central to the new Sawyer honors its neighbor. Marble that was recovered during the renovation of Stetson Hall was used for the stairs in the new building.

 

Downstairs at the new Sawyer, there is a small cafe that features vending machines with soft drinks, snacks and single-serve coffee. There also is a periodical reading room adorned with walls that used to be part of a room in Stetson. The college removed the walls and hung suspended them from the ceiling of the new space to create the illusion of early 20th century tradition in a very 21st century building.

 

The doors to the new Sawyer were opened on July 23, but its formal dedication is Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m., in a ceremony that is open to the public.

 

Although the building is just a couple of months old and the semester is only a couple of weeks old, Pilachowski is encouraged that the new Sawyer is becoming the kind of campus center of research and learning that designers envisioned.

 

"I talk to people, and not only are they smiling, they're really excited," he said. "People have passed comments on to us — faculty and staff — that they've overheard students across campus talking about it. There's this buzz about the building, which is nice to hear.

 

"I would say one thing that has been a little bit of a surprise to me is that even after just one week of the semester ... I was in one evening and the building looked like we were one week removed from final exams. All of the areas were at least 50 percent full, and some were 60 and 70 percent full. The building has been very popular, and lots of people are smiling."