Wegner Center, library await upgrades
Technology and furniture upgrades worth $50,000 have been approved for the Wegner Health Science Information Center in Sioux Falls.
The Wegner Center supports the health sciences at the University of South Dakota and is part of the Sanford School of Medicine campus. The building is under the management of USD, but partners with Sanford Health and a number of healthcare providers in the Sioux Falls area, said Dean of Libraries Dan Daily.
Five study rooms will be the focal point of the project, which is expected to be complete by next fall.
“(The study rooms) are used quite heavily, and we basically want to bring them on to something you see here at I.D. Weeks,” Daily said.
Earnings from the King endowment will pay for half of the cost, and the other half will be paid by the Sanford School of Medicine.
One need that will be addressed by upgrades will be equipping one or two rooms specifically for teleconferencing, Daily said. There will also be an emphasis on creating more workstations.
Nursing student Rose Abusharkh has spent her fair share of time in the Wegner Center, and said the most beneficial part of the building is the ability to book private rooms to study with groups, so more space and a few additions could be added to make the space fit for students.
“The Wegner Center would benefit from adding larger tables with more comfortable office chairs,” Abusharkh said.
USD Libraries Master Plan
Major changes are also in store for the university libraries located in Vermillion.
An ongoing space study at USD has prepared a detailed plan for reconfiguring I.D. Weeks Library to provide easier access to student services in one central location, said Kurt Hackemer, USD’s associate vice president for Academic Affairs.
The first and second floors will be used for numerous student services, as well as the archives, special collections and oral history center. Books will remain tightly packed on the third floor.
The Academic Career Planning Center, the Center for Academic and Global Engagement and the student-athlete center will all remain, but other services like the center for teaching and learning, the math emporium and the testing center will eventually migrate to I.D. Weeks.
“If you take a look at not just I.D. Weeks, but the Weeks-MUC complex — that is now the heart of campus,” Hackemer said. “That is where the action is, and if we want to be efficient about providing services to students in an easy way, we had to figure out what services had to be located in that whole complex.”
The project is expected to take two to three years, and is split into five or six phases. The gradual construction will allow “the majority of the building to stay open the majority of the time,” Hackemer said.
Adjacencies — referring to offices which ought to be located near each other, either in the same building, or right next to each other — is a prominent aspect to the project. Hackemer said the plan is to address university issues where students have to walk from one side of campus to the other to complete a test or lesson.
The university is also pursuing a new design which will take into account how a space can be flexible, so when the student-athlete center is not in its peak hours, some of its space could be used for another student service.
The cost of the project has not been finalized, but payment will come from assessing the university’s existing budget and identifying funds from areas like maintenance and repair, as well as funds from Academic Affairs designated for strategic initiatives Daily said.
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“It is not that we don’t have any money identified, it is that we don’t have an exact sense of the cost yet. We don’t know exactly what it is going to be,” Hackemer said.
Upgrades will also consist of more study tables with built in ports and screens, and Daily said he is looking forward to the extra space allotted to archives, special collections, the oral history center and student study spaces.
“We are on the edge of some really exciting developments, both with the physical spaces in I.D. Weeks and the Wegner Center,” Daily said.
