Senior administrators with Mount Allison University have announced plans for a five year, $85 million project that will begin construction this summer, and has been in the works since 2018.
The school will be breaking ground this summer on Landsdowne Street behind the Athletic Centre to build a 40,000 square foot building to temporarily house the university’s library for three years, while the octagonal Ralph Pickard Bell library undergoes a major renovation.
The plan is to have the new building ready in two years, by the summer of 2026, and then move library services onto Landsdowne until 2029, when the renewed Ralph Pickard Bell library is slated to reopen. After serving as a temporary library for three years, the new building will be outfitted as a multipurpose athletic facility for the school.
Mount A’s interim president Robert MacKinnon, vice president of finance Robert Inglis, dean of libraries Rachel Rubin, and director of facilities management Kris Kierstead presented the plan in two presentations to the university community on Wednesday afternoon and evening.
Hear Rachel Rubin and Kris Kierstead talk about the project after their presentation on Wednesday:
The total project will cost about $85 million, says Inglis, with provincial and federal governments chipping in $36 million, and donations making up most of the rest. The plan includes $5 million to come from the university’s operational funds, but Inglis says staff are working to reduce that as much as possible.
Kierstead told those gathered and listening online that renovation of the Ralph Pickard Bell library was necessary, because the 54-year-old building is nearing the “end of its useful life”. The library opened in 1970 to replace a much smaller Memorial Library.
Inglis said he was excited that the project would also fill another longstanding need with the school’s recreation and athletic facilities, which he says were originally built to accommodate just 1500 students. (In 2023, Mount Allison enrolled nearly 2400 full time students, according to statistics from the Association of Atlantic Universities.)
“I’m very excited that $2 of problems are being solved with $1 of spending,” said Inglis.
Plans for a library renewal have been in the works since 2018 when a Libraries 2025 Vision Committee was created and began consulting with the university community. In 2020, a new president’s committee took over, and by March 2021 architects were working on functional plans for the renovation.
Rubin joined Mount A as dean of libraries in 2022, and then last year, the school announced $36 million in contributions from the federal and provincial governments toward the project.
Rubin and Kierstead say the concept plans for the project have changed in the past year, to reflect what they heard in their most recent round of engagement, and also the inflationary economy. Rubin says plans may now include combined uses in some of the newly designed spaces, as opposed to dedicated spaces for things such as exhibitions.
Sketches of the renovated library show the breezeway that currently connects the library with the neighbouring Crabtree building completely enclosed in glass, and serving as the entrance for the library, with a cafe and moveable soft seating. There will also be another new entrance to the library on what is now the back side of the building, facing onto York Street.
The main octagonal building will see new, much larger windows, and centre floor cut outs to allow light through, with new stairs installed around the centre space.
“We really tried to create that sense of warmth, comfort, studiousness,” says Rubin, ”but also, like ‘living room’… where to be social, where to be communal, where to build that sense of community.”
While the main collections will move to the new interim library and then back into the Ralph Pickard Bell, Rubin said that the University Archives, and a subsection of less frequently used materials, will be relocated outside the building. The basement of Convocation Hall will be renovated to store the less-frequently used collection, which can be retrieved upon request.
The future of the archives is still unsettled, but Inglis said the university is in talks with the United Church of Canada about possible use of its state-of-the-art archives building on Wright Avenue.
Rubin says that the current number of items in the collection–around 500,000–will remain roughly the same between the renovated RP Bell and Convocation Hall spaces. “The collection management that we do in preparation for this is driven by what our librarians and faculty think that we need to have,” says Rubin. “If there are redactions in the collection, it will be because we are trying to make the collection the way that it should be, to serve our users… That’s something that we do all the time.”
At the funding announcement last January, MP and Minister Dominic Leblanc said the $26 million in federal funding for the project is coming from the green infrastructure stream of the Canada-New Brunswick bilateral infrastructure agreement.
The project will use a sustainability certification program called Green Globes, says Kierstead. Mount Allison is aiming for three out of a possible four Green Globes, meaning it ticks off 70-84% of the requirements under factors such as construction materials, methods, and the lifetime of the buildings.
Kierstead said the buildings will not achieve net zero in terms of carbon emissions. “That would be really a monumental leap forward and probably not currently within our reach,” said Kierstead. “There are measures within Green Globes for incorporating renewable strategies,” he said. “I’m not sure yet if those are the ones we’ll be picking for this project, but we’ll be exploring those sorts of measures.”
The timeline for construction shows work on the interim library building starting this summer, with a goal of moving the core collections out of the Ralph Pickard Bell library in the spring of 2026. At that point, construction is slated to begin on the Ralph Pickard Bell library and breezeway, with a completion goal of spring 2029. The newly renovated library is due to open in the fall of 2029.
Mount Allison says it will post regular updates about the library project on its website.