Tour the High-Tech Hunt

If you work at NC State and haven’t yet had a chance to fully explore the inspiring spaces and new technologies at the Hunt Library on Centennial Campus, you’ll soon get your chance. NCSU Libraries invites faculty and staff to an open house at the new library from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday, March 7. Enjoy light refreshments and take a tour of the remarkable facility.

Here are just a few of the jaw-dropping features you’ll find in the new library:

• The bookBot is a wonder to behold (and can be viewed through a giant glass window in “Robot Alley” on the library’s first floor). When a patron requests a book on the library’s website, the bookBot goes into action. One of its arms rushes between the 50-foot-tall stacks of metallic bins, locates the correct one, and automatically pulls it from the shelf. It lifts the bin up to a loading dock on second floor, where a library staff member is waiting. The staff member pulls the book from the bin and places it in a cart for delivery to the library customer, usually within five minutes. Once a customer returns a book, it’s placed in any available bin and returned to the stacks. Each book’s location is recorded and tracked through the use of barcodes.
• The library sports five Christie MicroTiles displays. At 21 feet wide, these video walls dwarf every other monitor on campus, and even surpass the size of the MicroTiles display at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte. With resolution four times as great as a standard HD monitor and a color gamut far exceeding broadcast television specs, the displays are amazingly crisp and bright. For student game designers, these displays provide the ultimate in hands-on education.
• The library has more than 100 group study rooms–their walls composed of whiteboard material–to meet the nearly insatiable demand for collaborative space on campus. The rooms feature flat-panel displays, thin-client computer connections, Web-based video conferencing and touchpad controllers.
• Looking for the latest digital tools to create your next masterpiece? Visit the Apple Technology Showcase. Surrounded by glass walls, this is the place to see and try out the constantly changing array of devices and technologies available for loan.

For a complete rundown of the spaces and features in the Hunt Library, visit the website.

During the open house, you’ll have the opportunity to watch the 3-D printers turn ideas into real objects, view large-scale visualizations that are changing how researchers display data, try out some of the 75 different chairs in 115 colors and check out the best view of Lake Raleigh on campus. It all starts on the first floor level by the bookBot.