By JENNI LESTER
The new edition to the Harold B. Lee Library will be a great asset to students when it is completed in February of 1999, according to Doug Welling, vice president of Jacobson Construction.
Welling spoke to the engineering department Thursday about the construction of the new edition to the library.
“We’re about halfway completed now. The completion of the project is scheduled for February of 1999,” Weller said. The construction started in September of 1996 and should take a total of 27 months to finish from that date.
BYU’s library is not able to accommodate nearly enough of the student population, Welling said. Once the edition is finished, it will provide students with more room and better facilities in which to study and work.
He said the new edition will have more study carrels, a 200-seat auditorium, four electronic classrooms and two more computer rooms. He also said the finished edition will contain a family history library second only in quantity of information to Salt Lake’s.
He said the new edition will allow students and faculty to access library information from their personal computers. Also, every study table in the finished edition will be wired to a modem students can use to access the Internet.
Welling also expressed concern for student safety and asked for everyone’s help in preventing any accidents that might occur around the construction site. “We would ask that everyone be sensitive to the dangers of construction,” he said.
Welling called the construction of the library edition his “most challenging project.” The finished product will be 244,000 square feet total and will take 235,000 cubic yards of excavated earth to make room for it. Welling said if the construction crew worked non-stop, it would take a dirt-filled truck leaving the construction site every five minutes 204 days straight to move that much dirt.
The library edition project “was won on a hard bid basis,” Welling said. Jacobson Construction won the project because they offered BYU the lowest bid. Funding for the project came from 100 percent donated funds, he said.
