South view: new "crystal pavilion," tower, and gateway, bookended by Perkins on left and Old Chem on right photo by Les Todd / illustration by Maxine Mills

t's 2012, and members of the Class of 2002 are back on campus for their tenth reunion. As they meander through the stone gates of Chapel Drive, down past the gardens and up past the Allen Building, they take in views of looming stone and graceful plantings, at once familiar and evocative. But then they reach the Main Quad, and the sense of the known is touched with a sense of difference--a reorientation of the Duke they remember, a change at whose heart sits Perkins Library.

As they enter the library, that change is more apparent. Gone are the cramped spaces, the scattered service desks, the unreachable outdoor space in the center. In their place have arisen galleries, seminar rooms, special-collections centers, consolidated service points, and a gleaming, glass-roofed atrium. A new tower of reading rooms and study spaces hovers over a walkway and lets readers glance up from their studies to see Duke Chapel. And all around are comfortable seats, technology terminals, and the ever-present shelves of books.

Reorientation underpins all of the changes. Reorientation of physical space within the building, as services are gathered into convenient central areas and study spaces meet social spaces. Reorientation of thinking, as the needs of high technology co-exist with but never overwhelm the reliability of the printed word. Even reorientation of the geography of West Campus itself, as the plans call for the library to anchor a new vista sweeping up from the Sarah P. Duke Gardens through the new tower gateway to the new science and engineering campus, an axis crossing the long traditional line from the Davison Building to Crowell Quad. And this reorientation is the accomplishment of today's Perkins Library master plan, which started in August 2000 with focus groups and committee discussions, continued with the construction of off-site book shelving at the Library Service Center completed last year, and now, following the recent approval of the design by the board of trustees, is ready for three phases of construction that will take the cramped, rambling structure from its current incarnation into the future.

The library has undergone major changes before. When it was built in 1928, Julian Abele had held to J.B. Duke's idea of the library joining the Chapel and divinity school as a major part of the young campus. An initial expansion took place in 1948, followed by a doubling of space in 1968. And while that 1968 renovation gained room for books and cataloguing, it is cited by most involved in today's planning as "crummy" and "a disaster," partly because of the way library services are evolving from staff-oriented to reader-oriented, and partly because of technology.

"This building is a nightmare to use--it's a pretty tired facility. It's not of the caliber that one would expect of Duke University," says University Librarian David Ferriero, who came to Duke from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 knowing that a major renovation lay in the near future. "The three pieces of the building--1928, 1948, and 1968--were never integrated very well, so in terms of arranging collections and facilitating the flow of people, it doesn't work. We have at least seven different service points on four different floors. We should give an award to the student or researcher who is successful in this building--it's just very difficult to find your way around."

Not only did the complexities make it difficult to navigate the floor plans, but they also hindered the best use of the library for study and research. "When you look at the situation at Duke, you see the changing nature of library collections and operations, and that has certain implications," says Bob Byrd '72, director of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections library, who co-chaired the library's strategic planning committee and chaired the renovation committee. "If you have a building forty years old and it hasn't had a major renovation, you know it isn't really designed for and doesn't have the infrastructure for the kind of information transfer that is essential today--wiring, wireless networks, even electrical outlets. You also know that its major mechanical systems are at the end of their life. So all of that has to be redone because you have a thirty-plus-year-old building.

"You also have the fact that Duke as an institution has grown and changed. In 1969, we added our two millionth volume--we have pased five million. The student body at Duke was 7,250 in 1968-69, with 4,700 undergraduates--it's now 6,200 undergraduates, and 11,200 overall."

The need for overhaul has been recognized for years, and groundwork was laid in the 1990s with architectural studies and use surveys. When the current process began in earnest more than two years ago, Provost Peter Lange charged the committee to "think creatively about the nature of library services and facilities needed at Duke over the next fifteen to twenty years," while focusing on "the evolving nature of library services in relationship to changes in Duke's curriculum, information technology, scholarly communication, and campus facilities."

That charge served the architects for the project, the Boston firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, whose history goes back to H.H. Richardson and whose work includes research libraries at Dartmouth and Columbia. Geoff Freeman, Shepley Bulfinch's choice for the Duke project, brought an awareness of new directions in library design and an enthusiasm for Duke's specific needs.

"In the last few years, we have been experiencing an intense period of re-evaluation of the role of the library in the academic life of a great university," Freeman says. "Like most all other major institutions, Duke faces the challenge of needing to revitalize its library as a center of intellectual life.

"The glaring issue facing Duke has to do with the disparity between the present, physical environment of the Perkins Library and the quality of research and scholarship expected of its students and faculty. Having worked on more than seventy-five academic libraries across the country, I have never seen a larger disconnect between the library as a physical place and the quality of intellectual life of the campus. It's almost as if Duke has somehow just rolled along despite the inability of the Perkins building to respond to dramatic changes in learning and research styles and advances in information technology. Perkins offers extraordinary services and an excellent collection, but what's missing is a physical environment that can respond to and substantially enhance the academic experience at Duke--a library that can move forward with the aspirations of the institution."