Content Planning for a Storytelling Building

Mike Nutt, Jason Casden North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

The Hunt Library

Opened January 2, 2013 2013 AIA/ALA Library Building Award bookBot automated storage and retrieval system Makerspace 795 sq ft of Christie MicroTiles 2 immersive digital environments Designed by Snhetta 100 bookable rooms Come-to-you service model

The Storytelling Building

http://go.ncsu.edu/myhunt
When the Hunt Library was planned, NCSU Libraries made the strategic decision to build immersive visualization spaces throughout the building, including ve large, architecturally integrated video walls. These visualization displays allow the Hunt Library to be a storytelling building: a building that provides a character-driven, narrative window into the teaching, research, and learning activities on our campus. If funders like the National Science Foundation continue to value research products like interactive visualizations of big data sets, then some libraries may indeed nd new service models through large-area displays. However, it will take time for the academy to gure out how to support these highly technical researchbased use cases. In the meantime, large area displays can play a more basic role in the fabric of everyday, modern campus life by connecting us to our colleagues and classmates.

Stories & the Third Place

Oldenburgs third places are neutral social sites where conversation is the main activity.* The most effective digital spaces will not simply help you see things in new ways, they will help you learn more about the person standing next to you. Libraries have a rich history preserving and providing access to stories. Now, libraries can blend architecture and digital media to share stories that fuel conversations about our campuses and the world.
* Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place!. New York: Marlowe.

My #HuntLibrary and lentil

We promoted the hashtag #HuntLibrary and a small team of developers built an application that collected #HuntLibrary photos from Instagram, built an interactive online collection, and added them to our digital archives. A rotating selection of the recent and popular pictures was displayed on a 150square-foot, curved video wall near the entrance to the library. The resulting crowdsourced collection of over 2700 images reects an enthusiasm for the library that we couldnt have manufactured in our public relations department. However, it was the video wall installation that brought the interactivity of online social networking into the building and gave our opening activities the dynamism we were looking for. We released the code that supported My #HuntLibrary as the open-source lentil project.

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