Bata Library not quite ready after renos but about to reopen

The Bata Library at Trent University is about to reopen after a year of renovations.

The library closed on May 1, 2017 and is expected to reopen soon – although the university website doesn’t specify a date.

But it does state that the renovations are 90 per cent complete, and that staff and project partners are “putting the final touches” on the $18-million renovation.

“More on dates and details will be shared as they become available,” states the Trent University website.

Meanwhile, books are currently being put back on shelves at Bata and all library services are expected to be available to students when the fall term starts.

Classes begin at Trent on Thursday. When the 50-year-old building reopens, the first two floors will have been transformed into the Bata Research and Innovation Centre.

There will be no more stacks on those floors, meaning the library’s book collection will be reduced by about 50 per cent, university officials explained when the project was first announced.

Instead, there will be study and meeting spaces dedicated to specific areas of research: one for entrepreneurship, for instance, another for research on aging, and another for Indigenous studies.

Trent has digitized 250,000 books from the library, the university website states, and those digital resources will be available.

The books that will be retained by the library will be those that are historically important, for example, or those unavailable in digital format or only available at Trent.

While the Bata Library has been under construction, there have been a couple of temporary library locations.

One is at the former Shoppers Drug Mart at Charlotte and Aylmer streets, for example; that has served for more than a year as a location for reference materials such as rare books, maps and microforms.

The circulating books were moved to a warehouse on Whittington Dr. in Cavan Monaghan Township, just northwest of Fleming College.