By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: September 12, 2012
After a long wait, UFV’s Chilliwack library finally has a new facility.
It’s a journey that they’ve been working towards for over two decades.
“Back in the early ‘90s, there was a plan that another building would go up on campus, and that the library would be the primary tenant,” Kim Isaac, UFV’s head librarian, explained during the official opening last week. “So we got really excited, and had these wonderful plans, and were imagining the best – and then the funding got pulled.”
Those plans were dusted off several times over the years, but the new library didn’t materialize until the opening of UFV’s new building at Canada Education Park (CEP) earlier this summer.
Isaac could barely stop smiling long enough to introduce the new facility.
The new library, which is housed on the ground floor of the new CEP building, is twice the size of the old facility, with 20 rows of shelves and an integrated study room for students.
Another new feature of the new library is the inclusion of the Writing Centre, the Math Centre, and Educational Technology Services within the library.
“This is the Learning Commons,” Isaac explained. “So it’s a physical area that’s brought together a number of departments that share common goals of working with instructors and working with students in the context of their academic work here.”
This will allow students to get help with whatever they’re working on without having to leave the library, and is something that will also helpfully allow the Writing and Math Centres to reach more students.
The building is not only functional, but beautiful; it boasts a wall of windows overlooking the nature of Canada Education Park, and accents of reclaimed cedar are threaded in the walls and ceilings as part of the green initiatives of the new building.
Although the library opened to the public in July, it had an official opening last week with speeches, tea and cake. The afternoon also included a nod to local Stó:l? culture with a traditional cedar brushing performed by Shirley Hardman, UFV’s senior advisor on aboriginal affairs. The ceremony, Hardman explained, served to cleanse the library of stress and make it a welcoming atmosphere for students and faculty alike.
Hardman also sang and drummed as part of the library opening, an act of welcome that is a Stó:l? tradition.
“The tradition of welcoming people this way with a song, in opening things like the library, is something that our people would do when visitors would come into the valley and up the river,” Hardman explained. “Even if you were just going by, we would sing a song that would acknowledge you had come by, and that you were welcome to stop.”
UFV’s president, Mark Evered, also spoke at the opening, describing libraries as the core of a university.
“A library is a manifestation of a fundamental feature of the human spirit,” Evered said, “one that has moved us forward in so many ways, as a species – a desire to reach beyond not just our own community, while we live, but to future generations.”
The library is now open for the semester: 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m on Friday, 10 am to 4 pm on Saturday, and closed on Sundays.
