State-of-the-art facilities planned for Forum's new home

January 6, 2010 – The University Library and Collaborations for Health, an interfaculty initiative, are jointly establishing two new state-of-the art facilities in Mills Library to house the McMaster Health Forum and the Lyons New Media Centre.

The facilities are being built in adjacent space on the fourth floor of Mills, with construction scheduled to start in January and to be completed by early May, 2010.

The study space and collections now housed in the area will be relocated to other areas within the library, to ensure library users will continue to have access to the study carrels from the reading room and the books currently in that location.

The McMaster Health Forum is a newly-formed organization that aspires to be recognized as a world-leading hub for improving health outcomes through collective problem-solving. The Forum has already organized a series of successful stakeholder dialogues that involve harnessing evidence on pressing health challenges, and convening influential doers and thinkers from across the province, country and globe to deliberate and work towards creative solutions. Examples of topics addressed to date include improving access to primary health care in Canada, strengthening chronic disease management in Ontario, and engaging civil society in the use of research in health systems globally.

The Forum is also involved in various other initiatives to provide innovative opportunities for students with a particular interest in health care systems and decision-making (as part of its commitment to prepare local, national and international action-oriented leaders) and to include citizen representatives in the health care decision-making process.

The Forum has already secured more than $1.25 million in funding from organizations such as the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support its initiatives.

The new facilities will provide the Forum with a state-of-the-art meeting venue called the DialogueSpace, as well as a Hub for informal gatherings, a BreakoutSpace for simultaneous or concurrent gatherings, and a WorkSpace for Forum Fellows (both undergraduate and graduate students), Visiting Leaders and staff.

The Forum Director, John Lavis, is excited by the potential for the new facility to become known as the place to go to ‘break log jams’ in the health sector and to be exposed to current and future leaders.

“The McMaster Health Forum has received enthusiastic endorsement from University leadership,” said Susan Denburg, director of Collaborations for Health and associate vice-president, academic for the Faculty of Health Sciences. “In addressing pressing health issues with stakeholders and decision-makers, we have the opportunity to enable and showcase exciting interfaculty collaboration involving our faculty and students. We are looking forward to the technological collaboration that will arise through co-location with the Lyons New Media Centre.”

The sister facility, the Lyons New Media Centre, is a natural expansion of the existing Lyons Media Centre. Complementing the Lyons media collection (which has now been merged into the Library's collection) the Lyons New Media Centre will become an incubator for the innovative use of new and traditional media in teaching, learning and research at McMaster.

Centre staff will provide a wide variety of services including:
• support and consultation for a wide range of digital media projects, including video and audio editing, graphics and web page design, and scanning options for documents and images
• hands-on assistance to faculty who want to digitize materials for classes
• short courses on editing video, creating DVDs, producing podcasts and using the Web for research
• a collection of scholarly resources on DVD and compact disc (including the Lyons media collection)
• lecture capture and archiving
• exploration and promotion of the use of new media to support teaching, learning and research

Spaces will include video and audio editing workstations, group viewing rooms, video-gaming rooms, and a small media teaching centre. A variety of equipment will be made available for student and faculty use including portable audio recorders, high-definition camcorders and a green screen.

The Centre will feature a large video wall to showcase the media creation process, to highlight faculty and student research and to display faculty and student media projects. The video wall may also be used for special media rich presentations.

University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak is thrilled to have the two new centres take up residence in the Library.

“The University Library is pleased to be the home for these important new centres,” said Trzeciak. “The design of the spaces will facilitate the hosting of important debates and dialogues on critical topics that can later be discovered, used and reused for learning and research. The two spaces complement each other perfectly and are representative of the changing role of the University Library.”