for final examinations and served breakfast by the Faculty and Staff.
Southwestern has reopened one of its most historic campus buildings after a $25M renovation, blending modern classrooms and gathering spaces with its original character.
Artist Unknown / Image Source: Bilkent Üniversitesi Türkiye
“The health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture
and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
—Carl Sagan
The founding of many educational institutions throughout the world was marked with the building of a place of worship (LEARN MORE: See College & University Chapels). After the church the library was the second building. It seems likely that after the library the “Media Center” will emerge as the replacement facility category (occupancy classification) in building codes and standards. It will be difficult letting go of the memories and the ambiance of these places and spaces. Who does not have a favorite place in a favorite library?
The original University of Michigan advocacy enterprise presented structural engineering technical committees of the American Society of Civil Engineers with proposals to roll back the live loading criteria for “occupancies formerly known as libraries” — because stacks of books and paper filing cabinets were being replaced with laptop computers. Not only that, stacks of actual physical books in legacy libraries were being relocated off-site to slab-on-grade book warehouses leaving the space to be renovated as study areas or administrative offices.
Those proposals for Table 1607 of the International Building were rejected for lack of technical substantiation. Fair enough. Structural engineering is a fearsome art and you do not want to push too hard on the instincts of structural design professionals even though their risk-aversion instinct is raising cost for new media centers that are mis-characterized as “libraries”. Most standards developing committees are permitted to set their own criteria for technical substantiation. After the desire and obligation to design for public safety it is naive to discount their concern for the cost of professional liability insurance, however. There are times when you are willing to pay for another power of ten safety factor.
The International Building Code Code is deep into its 2021 revision and it appears that some correlation action with ASCE structural engineering codes might have occurred. Rather than risk inaccuracy, we will archive the technical details to the post linked at the bottom of this page. It is often necessary to do this when codes and standards relevant to a given education facility develop out of step with one another.
We will continue following other library-related concepts are listed (very) briefly below:
Book shelf depth specifications
Lighting power densities, more occupancy sensors and daylight responsive controls
Inclusion of libraries in the conditions under which education facilities are used as community storm shelters.
Operating experience, use pattern anecdotes, war stories and such are always gratefully received any day during our colloquia however direct participation in the ICC Code Development Process should always be a first choice. CLICK HERE to get started.
This is the library of the school where I work (it’s also my summer writing office). If I were in charge (which I should be) every kid in the land would have access to a library like this. 📚📚📚❤️ pic.twitter.com/Tb3GIO0zSt
The image criteria of our WordPress theme does not permit many images of college and university libraries to be shown fully dimensioned on sliders or widget galleries. We reproduce a few of the outsized images here and leave the complexities of financing, designing, building and maintaining of them in a safe and sustainable manner for another day. If you need specific information please refer to the links at the bottom on this, very long, page.
Click on any image for image credit and other information
“Bibliotheque_Sainte-Genevieve” | University of Paris, et al
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Johns Hopkins University
Library at Thorildsplans Gymnasium (Thorildsplan upper secondary school) | Stockholm, Sweden
Iowa State University
Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem
University of Oxford
George H.W. Bush Library | Texas A&M University
Bilkent Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi / Türkiye
St. John’s College | University of Cambridge
Tama Art University Library | 多摩美術大学
University of San Diego
Delft University of Technology Library
University of Notre Dame
University of Utrecht
University of Ottawa
University of Derby
Akita International University | Nakajima Library
Dominican University
Erasmus University
The Masters University
The Ohio State University
University of Washington
Vilnius University Library
Biblioteca Centrală a Universității Politehnica Timișoara | Romania
Starting 2026 we will organize our weekly syllabi in a less structured but in a more time sensitive manner. Stay tuned.
100 years ago, the Supreme Court made it clear in Pierce v. Society of Sisters: raising children is the responsibility of parents, not the government.
100 years later, the Trump Administration remains committed to protecting parental rights. pic.twitter.com/yduXdLShty
— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) June 1, 2025
“…O chestnut tree;, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bold? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
We sweep through the world’s three major time zones; updating our understanding of the literature at the technical foundation of education community safety and sustainability in those time zones 24 times per day. We generally eschew “over-coding” web pages to sustain speed, revision cadence and richness of content as peak priority. We do not provide a search facility because of copyrights of publishers and time sensitivity of almost everything we do.
Our daily colloquia are typically doing sessions; with non-USA titles receiving priority until 16:00 UTC and all other titles thereafter. We assume policy objectives are established (Safer-Simpler-Lower-Cost, Longer-Lasting). Because we necessarily get into the weeds, and because much of the content is time-sensitive and copyright protected, we usually schedule a separate time slot to hammer on technical specifics so that our response to consultations are meaningful and contribute to the goals of the standards developing organization and to the goals of stewards of education community real assets — typically the largest real asset owned by any US state and about 50 percent of its annual budget.
1. Leviathan. We track noteworthy legislative proposals in the United States 118th Congress. Not many deal specifically with education community real assets since the relevant legislation is already under administrative control of various Executive Branch Departments such as the Department of Education.
We do not advocate in legislative activity at any level. We respond to public consultations but there it ends.
We track federal legislative action because it provides a stroboscopic view of the moment — the “national conversation”– in communities that are simultaneously a business and a culture. Even though more than 90 percent of such proposals are at the mercy of the party leadership the process does enlighten the strengths and weakness of a governance system run entirely through the counties on the periphery of Washington D.C. It is impossible to solve technical problems in facilities without sensitivity to the zietgeist that has accelerated in education communities everywhere.
Michigan Great Lake Quilt
Michigan can 100% water and feed itself. Agriculture is its second-largest industry.
…’Nestled at the entrance of Tel Aviv University’s Brender-Moss Library for Social Sciences, Management, and Education, a coffee cart—welcomes students and faculty with its setup on the entrance floor and adjacent plaza.
Under wide umbrellas, patrons sip aromatic hot coffees, iced lattes, or refreshing cold drinks while munching on fresh baked goods, sandwiches and snacks. Seating spills into designated library nooks, blending caffeine-fueled focus with outdoor breezes…’
7 Tel Aviv University students. 1 epic @TEDx stage.
Last week, seven remarkable Tel Aviv University students challenged traditional perspectives and shared groundbreaking ideas during the inaugural TEDxTelAvivUniversity event themed: “The New “Old”: Ideas, Reimagined.”
Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die
No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever
— Franklin Roosevelt
Many education communities build and maintain cultural resource properties whose safety and sustainability objectives are informed by local adaptations of consensus products developed by the International Code Council (ICC) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). We need to understand the ICC and NFPA product suites as a pair. For most real assets in the education industry they move “roughly” in tandem even though they are produced by different organizations for a different set of customers. Sometimes the out-of-step condition between NFPA and ICC permits subject matter experts on technical committees to make the best possible decisions regarding the safety and sustainability agenda of the interest group they represent; but not always.
Occupancy classification is always a first consideration and both the NFPA and the ICC have a claim to some part of this occupancy concept*. In the ICC suite we find code requirements for many “cultural places of worship” tracking in the following sections of the International Building Code (IBC):
Note that Sections 305 and 308 recognize the accessory and multi-functional nature of occupancy types in the education industry – i.e child care and adult care function can marge and be an accessory to a place of worship. The general rule in the IBC is that accessory religious educational rooms and religious auditoriums with occupant loads of less than 100 per room or space are not considered separate occupancies. Other standards developers are guided by this rule.
• This code describes principles and practices of protection for cultural resource properties (including, but not limited to, museums, libraries, and places of worship), their contents, and collections, against conditions or physical situations with the potential to cause damage or loss.
• This code covers ongoing operations and rehabilitation and acknowledges the need to preserve culturally significant and character-defining building features and sensitive, often irreplaceable, collections and to provide continuity of operations.
• Principles and practices for life safety in cultural resource properties are outside the scope of this code. Where this code includes provisions for maintaining means of egress and controlling occupant load, it is to facilitate the evacuation of items of cultural significance, allow access for damage limitation teams in an emergency, and prevent damage to collections through overcrowding or as an unintended consequence of an emergency evacuation.
• Library and museum collections that are privately owned and not open to the public shall not be required to meet the requirements of this code.
Since we are hard upon release of the 2021 Edition of NFPA 909 let us take a backward look at the current (2017) version of NFPA 909 Code for the Protection of Cultural Resource Properties – Museums, Libraries, and Places of Worship. Chapter 14 covers “Museums, Libraries and their Collections”. Chapter 15 covers “Places of Worship”
The 2025 Edition is now open for public input. Let us pick through proposals for the 2021 Edition to inform our approach to its improvement by referencing the technical committee transcripts linked below:
N.B. We find committee response (accepted in principle) to Standards Michigan proposal to articulate conditions in which places of worship and libraries are used as community disaster relief support facilities. We consider this a modest “code win”.
Circling back to the ICC suite we find elevated interest in hardening community owned facilities to tornadoes, hurricane and floods and other storm related risk in the structural engineering chapters of the International Building Code.
Leadership and facility managers for enterprises of this type are encouraged to contribute obtain their own (free) NFPA public participation account in order to directly participate in the 2025 revision of NFPA 909 by logging in here: https://www.nfpa.org/login.
Public consultation on the First Draft of the 2025 Edition closes January 4, 2024.
This document is also a standing item on our periodic Prometheus, Lively and Fine Arts teleconference. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Guidelines for the Security of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Other Special Collections,Association of College & Research Libraries, American Library Association, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2795.
“A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections,”Malaro, Marie, second edition 1998
“Risk and Insurance Management Manual for Libraries,”Mary Breighner and William Payton, edited by Jeanne Drewes, ALA 2005 ISBN 0-8389-8325-1.
Wisconsin Historic Building Code, Madison, WI:Wisconsin Administrative Code.
We examine the proposals for the 2028 National Electrical Safety Code; including our own. The 2026 National Electrical Code where sit on CMP-15 overseeing health care facility electrical issues should be released any day now. We have one proposal on the agenda of the International Code Council’s Group B Committee Action Hearings in Cleveland in October. Balloting on the next IEEE Gold Book on reliability should begin.
FERC Open Meetings | (Note that these ~60 minute sessions meet Sunshine Act requirements. Our interest lies one or two levels deeper into the technicals underlying the administrivia)
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei City, Taiwan
First Draft Proposals contain most of our proposals — and most new (original) content. We will keep the transcripts linked below but will migrate them to a new page starting 2025:
N.B. We are in the process of migrating electric power system research to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers bibliographic format.
Recap of the May meetings of the Industrial & Commercial Power Systems Conference in Las Vegas. The conference ended the day before the beginning of the 3-day Memorial Day weekend in the United States so we’re pressed for time; given all that happened.
We can use our last meeting’s agenda to refresh the status of the issues.
We typically break down our discussion into the topics listed below:
Codes & Standards:
While IAS/I&CPS has directed votes on the NEC; Mike is the only I&CPS member who is actually submitting proposals and responses to codes and standards developers to the more dominant SDO’s — International Code Council, ASHRAE International, UL, ASTM International, IEC & ISO. Mike maintains his offer to train the next generation of “code writers and vote getters”
Performance-based building premises feeder design has been proposed for the better part of ten NEC revision cycles. The objective of these proposals is to reduce material, labor and energy waste owed to the branch and feeder sizing rules that are prescriptive in Articles 210-235. Our work in service and lighting branch circuit design has been largely successful. A great deal of building interior power chain involves feeders — the network upstream from branch circuit panels but down stream from building service panel.
Our history of advocating for developing this approach, inspired by the NFPA 101 Guide to Alternative Approaches to Life Safety, and recounted in recent proposals for installing performance-based electrical feeder design into the International Building Code, appears in the link below:
Access to this draft paper for presentation at any conference that will receive it — NFPA, ICC or IEEE (or even ASHRAE) will be available for review at the link below:
NFPA 110 Definitions of Public Utility v. Merchant Utility
NFPA 72 “Definition of Dormitory Suite” and related proposals
Buildings:
Renovation economics, Smart contracts in electrical construction. UMich leadership in aluminum wiring statements in the NEC should be used to reduce wiring costs.
This paper details primary considerations in estimating the life cycle of a campus medium voltage distribution grid. Some colleges and universities are selling their entire power grid to private companies. Mike has been following these transactions but cannot do it alone.
Variable Architecture Multi-Island Microgrids
District energy:
Generator stator winding failures and implications upon insurance premiums. David Shipp and Sergio Panetta. Mike suggests more coverage of retro-fit and lapsed life cycle technicals for insurance companies setting premiums.
Reliability:
Bob Arno’s leadership in updating the Gold Book.
Mike will expand the sample set in Table 10-35, page 293 from the <75 data points in the 1975 survey to >1000 data points. Bob will set up meeting with Peyton at US Army Corps of Engineers.
Reliability of merchant utility distribution systems remains pretty much a local matter. The 2023 Edition of the NESC shows modest improvement in the vocabulary of reliability concepts. For the 2028 Edition Mike submitted several proposals to at least reference IEEE titles in the distribution reliability domain. It seems odd (at least to Mike) that the NESC committees do not even reference IEEE technical literature such as Bob’s Gold Book which has been active for decades. Mike will continue to propose changes in other standards catalogs — such as ASTM, ASHRAE and ICC — which may be more responsive to best practice assertions. Ultimately, improvements will require state public utility commission regulations — and we support increases in tariffs so that utilities can afford these improvements.
Mike needs help from IEEE Piscataway on standard WordPress theme limitations for the data collection platform.
Mike will update the campus power outage database.
Healthcare:
Giuseppe Parise’s recent work in Italian power grid to its hospitals, given its elevated earthquake risk. Mike’s review of Giuseppe’s paper:
Mike and David Shipp will prepare a position paper for the Harvard Healthcare Management Journal on reliability advantages of impedance grounding for the larger systems.
The Internet of Bodies
Forensics:
Giuseppe’s session was noteworthy for illuminating the similarity and differences between the Italian and US legal system in handling electrotechnology issues.
Mike will restock the committee’s library of lawsuits transactions.
Ports:
Giuseppe updates on the energy and security issues of international ports. Mike limits his time in this committee even though the State of Michigan has the most fresh water international ports in the world.
A PROPOSED GUIDE FOR THE ENERGY PLAN AND ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF A PORT
Other:
Proposals to the 2028 National Electrical Safety Code: Accepted Best Practice, exterior switchgear guarding, scope expansion into ICC and ASHRAE catalog,
Apparently both the Dot Standards and the Color Books will continue parallel development. Only the Gold Book is being updated; led by Bob Arno. Mike admitted confusion but reminded everyone that any references to IEEE best practice literature in the NFPA catalog, was installed Mike himself (who would like some backup help)
Mike assured Christel Hunter (General Cable) that his proposals for reducing the 180 VA per-outlet requirements, and the performance-base design allowance for building interior feeders do not violate the results of the Neher-McGrath calculation used for conductor sizing. All insulation and conducting material thermal limits are unaffected.
Other informal discussions centered on the rising cost of copper wiring and the implications for the global electrotechnical transformation involving the build out of quantum computing and autonomous vehicles. Few expressed optimism that government ambitions for the same could be met in any practical way.
Are students avoiding use of Chat GPT for energy conservation reasons? Mike will be breaking out this topic for a dedicated standards inquiry session:
Most educational settlements are not overloaded by signage by design but distracted management (overlapping temporary signs, inconsistent styles) or large footprints supports the perception. Today at the usual hour we explore the literature covering exterior and interior signage with emphases on coherence and necessity.
Signage must align with the educational institution’s brand identity, including logos, colors, and typography (e.g., Helvetica font is often specified, as seen in some university standards).
Corporate logos are typically prohibited on primary exterior signage to maintain institutional focus.
Compliance with Local Zoning and Building Codes
Signs must adhere to municipal zoning regulations, which dictate size, height, placement, and illumination (e.g., NYC Building Code Appendix H or similar local codes).
Permits may be required, and signage must not obstruct traffic visibility or pedestrian pathways.
ADA Accessibility Requirements
Exterior signs identifying permanent spaces (e.g., entrances or exits) must meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, including visual character requirements (legible fonts, sufficient contrast).
Tactile signs with Braille are required at specific locations like exit stairways or discharge points, per the U.S. Access Board guidelines, though not all exterior signs need to be tactile.
Wayfinding and Identification Functionality
Signs should clearly identify buildings, provide directional guidance, and include essential information (e.g., building names, departments, or campus districts).
Placement is typically near main entrances, limited to one per building unless otherwise justified.
Material and Durability Standards
Materials must be weather-resistant and durable (e.g., extruded or cast aluminum with finishes like natural or dark bronze, avoiding plastic in some cases).
Maintenance considerations ensure longevity and legibility over time.
Size and Placement Restrictions
Size is often regulated (e.g., no larger than necessary for legibility, with some institutions capping temporary signs at 32 square feet).
Placement avoids upper building portions unless in urban settings or campus peripheries, ensuring aesthetic harmony.
Approval and Review Processes
Exterior signage often requires review by a campus design or sign committee (e.g., a university’s Design Review Board).
For partnerships or donor-funded buildings, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) may govern signage rights and standards.
Safety and Visibility Standards
Signs must not create hazards (e.g., minimum clearance of 7.5 feet above walkways, no sharp edges).
Illumination, if allowed, must comply with safety codes and enhance visibility without causing glare or distraction.
Temporary Signage Regulations
Temporary signs (e.g., banners or construction signs) have time limits (e.g., 30-90 days per year) and must be approved, with size and frequency restrictions. The National Electrical Code Article 590 covers temporary wiring for festoon illumination and defines “temporary” as 90 days.
National Institutes of Health: Moral grandstanding in public discourse
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
