Campus · May 6, 2026
Halvorsen Library’s Fourth Floor Reopens After a Year-Long Renovation
The former closed-stack floor is now a mix of bookable group rooms, a quiet-only reading room, and a small gallery space.
Halvorsen Library has reopened its fourth floor after a year-long renovation that converted underused closed stacks into fourteen bookable group-study rooms, a strictly enforced quiet reading room, and a rotating gallery space for student and faculty work.
The renovation relocated the lowest-circulation portion of the print collection to a shared regional storage facility, retrievable within two business days on request. Library staff say fewer than one percent of annual circulation came from the material that moved.
“We were storing books nobody had touched in a decade in the same square footage students were fighting over for group project space. This was not a hard call.”
— dean of libraries
The gallery space debuts this month with a show of senior capstone work from the College of Arts, Communication & Design, and will rotate roughly each semester.
Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu
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