Trinity College Turns the Sod for New Building on Fellows Square
Posted on: 07 December 2009
Trinity College recently celebrated the construction of a new dedicated building for the Trinity Long Room Hub. The Trinity Long Room Hub is Trinity College’s arts and humanities research institute. This new facility will be a four storey, granite clad building and will be located between the 1937 Reading Room and the Arts Building, facing on to Fellows Square. The building is now under construction and is expected to be completed by April 2010.
The Trinity Long Room Hub is a facilitator for advanced research in the arts and humanities and serves a community consisting of seven schools and the library. It is a research platform nurturing creative minds and feeds back into society by producing the next generation of leaders, teachers, researchers and experts. The Trinity Long Room Hub supports a robust programme of projects and initiatives for postgraduate students which are designed to stimulate and sustain research in the arts and humanities.
Academic Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, Professor Poul Holm commented: “This is a fascinating time of innovation for the arts and humanities at Trinity College as the past meets the future through technology and advanced research methodologies. The Trinity Long Room Hub hosts a broad spectrum of activities in order to sustain research in the arts and humanities. Collaborative research currently takes place between market leaders such as Microsoft and IBM and the treasures of the Long Room in order to help develop and improve IT products. Digital arts and humanities unite art with IT and engineering, providing new content rich products such as GPS systems and photo technology. Local and international experts share their research through regular lectures and symposiums such as the biannual Lewis Glucksman Symposium. These are just some of the activities that are currently taking place in the Trinity Long Room Hub. This new facility will help sustain these and many more exciting research projects.”
The building will house a state of the art 90-seat lecture theatre that will be used for presentations, conferences, symposia and colloquia. Events in this theatre will be broadcast around the world via the internet, and will frequently be open to members of the general public. A further seminar room will be configured to support video-conferencing of academic and managerial meetings with national and international partners, as well as small-scaled seminars shared across multiple institutions.
The building will also house first class research facilities for post-doctoral and other researchers, as well as offices for international visiting research fellows. Fellows will be encouraged to interact formally, through a series of workshops and seminars, and informally with the other researchers in the building, as well as the wider Trinity arts and humanities community. This all-important informal interaction will be facilitated in the building’s ‘Ideas Space’; an informal setting for conversation and interaction. The building will also accommodate a team working on the digitisation of the treasures of Trinity’s great library: a vital component of the plan to unlock the treasures of the Long Room and display them to the world.
The Trinity Long Room hub building is a physical symbol of Trinity College’s commitment to research in the arts and humanities. It is being developed through funding received under the national programme for third-level institutions PRTLI IV.
The official opening is expected to take place during Trinity Week on Tuesday 13th April 2010. Trinity Week 2010 will be a celebration of the arts and humanities. To learn more about the activities of the Trinity Long Room Hub visit www.tcd.ie/longroomhub.
