mm. Port is a digital research commons located in
Torgersen Bridge. The space is open
to anyone with a valid Hokie passport. There are
several computers with geospatial, statistical visualization, and text analysis software
preinstalled.,There is also a meeting space
for classes, small groups and seminars.
Port offers tutorials and guidance on how to use their
software to suit your needs. Here we see a
demonstration of Adobe Photoshop's puppet feature. Students
can use the visualization software to build and integrate tools
such as a water sanitation map or media locator.
Libraries are going through some pretty significant transformations right now
and this is really at a global scale driven by
collections. A lot of our collections are moving from
print to digital. And this opens up by part
of that is that it opens up spaces, we
can get back to users get back to students and
faculty. So we spent a lot of time studying
what do these spaces need to be and the beyond
wireless, beyond electricity. The attribute that keeps coming
back over and over again is variety. We need
a variety of spaces for a variety of different tasks
that students in and that we have and you know
, we spend a lot of time thinking about the
environment that we want to create and the environment really
sets the stage for the types of behaviors, the
types of activities, the types of perceptions uh,
that can occur in that, in that area.
And if you, if you take, for example
, a group who is going to brainstorm, they
need a different type of environment than a group that
is uh writing a paper or developing a website or
rehearsing a talk same thing with individuals. If you
have someone who's, who's doing coding or design work
, it's different from someone who needs space to,
to read a book or prepare for a test and
that kind of thing. So really what we're kind
of starting to see is is the library is this
sort of this vast ecosystem and that's where report comes
in as as one of those destinations in that ecosystem
. And what's cool about port is that it has
flexibility to be a lot of different things, it
can be a consultation space, it can be a
studio space, it can be a lab, it
can be a multimedia productivity space and that's really what
the keys that we're looking at. It's a place
to sort of explore. It's a case to dabble
. Um it's a place to sort of discover and
and sort of share and collaborate and and really it's
it's still in its early stages and we're trying to
give it room sort of evolved to grow and to
figure out what port needs to become so