Planning for the New Centre

Planning for the new centre is moving along to schedule and we have been looking at the equipment needs for each of the areas in the newly refurbished centre. The floors will each have a different feel and have different types of provision resulting in a single centre where all students’ support needs can be met:

The ground floor of the Aldham Robarts building will be based around a Welcome desk and triage area, along with a variety of student study spaces and a transaction counter where students can consult staff and hand in assignments. There will also be dedicated student PCs, as well as areas for laptops and other mobile learning devices to be used. In addition students will be able to make use group study rooms, a seminar room and the LRC short loan collection.

The lower ground floor will contain learning resources and facilities including books and journals, the LRC slide collection, a media viewing area and the special collections and archives reading area. In addition the lower ground floor will offer 3 seminar rooms, group study rooms and a café area as well as plenty of student PCs, study space and casual seating.

The remaining floors of the Aldham Robarts LRC and the first floor of the Aquinas building will contain the majority of the books, journals and PCs, as well as new group study rooms, quiet study areas and consultation areas.

We are using Blackboard to share the detailed information with the staff involved in the project, and we have been busy populating that with various files.

The next part of the project is to collate all the detail so that we are in a position to go out to tender.