Renovation of Hale Library at Kansas State University continues to move forward following the May 18, 2018 fire that caused extensive damage to the facility.
The K-State Alumni Association has provided information on the recovery effort for the library. The Dave and Ellie Everitt Learning Commons on the first floor will open this fall and the second floor is schedueld to open at the beginning of the spring semester, followed shortly after that by the fifth floor. The final phase to be completed will be the 1927 historic Farrell Library restoration. The entire project should be completed by the end of 2020.
Not all of the furniture was a total loss in the fire. Some of the tables were salvaged and are stored on the second floor in the Farrell Library area.
Most of the library’s 1.5 million items ( books ) are in storage units in the limestone caves underneath Kansas City. The cleaning process is ongoing. Those boxes of material are rotated through a facility near the Manhattan Regional Airport where they’re cleaned by hand one at a time, and treated in an ozone chamber. They’re then reboxed and sent back to a storage unit filled with clean boxes. At this time more than 65 percent of the Hale Library collection is clean.
Funds donated to the Help for Hale campaign will be used to create improved study spaces, group study rooms, for more white boards and for more outlets.