Huge honour for Wexford’s Allison Kavanagh as she leads development of TU Dublin’s new academic hub
SITTING at the heart of Technological University Dublin’s Grangegorman campus, the new Academic Hub will be a library which facilitates all different approaches to learning.
Wexford woman Allison Kavanagh, as Head of Library Services for TU Dublin, is leading the way on this significant project which has been in the works for many years.
The Academic Hub will be 12,500 square metres, five stories high and home to approximately 200,000 books. Approximately 150,000 of those books will be moving from the current library at Park House and 50,000 will move from the Aungier Street library in a few years’ time.
Allison has been working for TU Dublin since 2004 when it was still known as Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). She now manages 73 full-time library staff across TU Dublin’s three campuses and five libraries and is also a member of the Senior Academic Leadership Team at the university.
The development of a fully integrated library service has become a major part of Allison’s role at TU Dublin. “Creating a single library service across five libraries across three campuses and at the same time doing a once in a career project which is to build a new library as well, so there’s two major projects at the same time,” said Allison.
Allison’s colleague Catherine Cooke is working on the development of the Academic Hub on a daily basis while Allison is part of the strategic vision of the library services at the university. “Particularly in this era of fake news, we have an important role to play there and educating citizens of the world in terms of being able to discern good information from misinformation.
“That’s something that’s just going to become more important to us over time. This new building is sort of a representation of the importance TU Dublin assigns to that sort of role that the library will play,” said Allison.
The planning for the new library on the Grangegorman campus has been ongoing for nearly 20 years. Before it became a university, the area was walled off to the local community as it had been home to a work house, a prison and a hospital for people with mental illnesses. The original masterplan for the development of the campus was to open up the area to the wider community and incorporate the 200 year old buildings that are still there today.
In a plan that architects drew up in 2008, the library was placed at the centre of the campus beside the central quad and the west quad, overlooking the playing fields. It wasn’t until 2016 that the specific design of the library began to formulate.
“The new library is located at the North House which is a protected structure and it’s going to incorporate the protected structure into the new building. It will accommodate different kinds of learning styles and student’s different needs at different times of the year. It will have a dedicated special collections area which will be climate controlled. You may want more collaborative spaces at certain times and quiet study spaces at other times. It will have facilities that we don’t currently have in any of our libraries so it will give us the opportunity to do new things in specialised spaces,” said Allison.
The Academic Hub will be the third library on the Grangegorman campus and Allison hopes it’s the last one for a while. “In 2014, Mount Joy Square Library moved over to a library at Rathdown House because the first cohort at students were studying in Grange Gorman. The East Quad and Central Quad were completed and around 10,000 moved over to the campus. With that amount of students they needed a much larger library,” said Allison.
Until the Academic Hub is completed, Park House Library was formed combining the libraries in Kevin’s Street, Rathmines, Cathal Brugha Street and Rathdown.
“I admire Catherine Cooke who managed the migration of all four libraries during Covid. When the Academic Hub is finished, that library will also decant and the building will be used for other purposes,” said Allison.
The Academic Hub will consist of five floors and will be the first fully multi-disciplinary library in TU Dublin. The ground floor is going to be open to the wider community with a café, reception, academic support services and an exhibition space. The library as well as a mixture of different spaces will be located on floor two, three, four and five. The Parkhouse Library is located across the road from the main campus but the new library will be right at the centre.
The big move from Grangegorman’s current Park House library will take professional movers four to five weeks to complete with the hopes of opening the new library in September 2024 and in May, Alison will celebrate 20 years of working at the university. “I’m very fortunate to have joined a university that’s going through a lot of change and that I’ve been able to shape the change and help design a new library service from the ground up,” said Allison.