UH campus gets The marble University of Hawaii sign on East-West Road has been scrubbed and polished.
welcome overhaul
for new semester
Several refurbished buildings
will greet returning studentsBy Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.comThe red, blue and green Center for Korean Studies has a new roof and a fresh coat of paint.
The stacks at Hamilton Library will once again be open for browsing, instead of the paging system that was in effect all summer.
It is the first day of school at UH, and it took a flurry of last-minute activity to create a proper welcome, including faculty members spending Saturday morning weeding, painting, picking up trash and washing the walkways.
At summer commencement, UH President Evan Dobelle said that he had sped up some projects on the maintenance schedule to six weeks from six months to create a brighter welcome for incoming students.
"I want to see paint cans, ladders, scaffolding," he said two weeks ago. And late into last week, they were still out around campus, as well as bright orange fencing, yellow tape and canvases and heavy machinery, all evidence of campus improvements.
Campus Center, the William S. Richardson School of Law and Bilger and Snyder halls have all been repainted. Nine buildings remain on the waiting list.
Gyms I and II, the Biomedical Building and Lyon Arboretum were all re-roofed. Nine more re-roofing projects are scheduled.
The Biomedical Building's fourth and fifth floors are also being remodeled.
Around campus, air conditioning and lighting have been upgraded, as have some classrooms in Kuykendall Hall. The Student Services Building has better acoustics and a parking office kiosk, and out front in Varney Circle are 10 new guest parking spaces.
However, across the circle, Hawaii Hall only exists as four freestanding walls, and Crawford Hall is still a hollow shell after both were gutted for renovation during the last academic year.
Probably the most dramatic change is at Hamilton Library. Throughout the summer, library materials were accessible only through a paging system while asbestos was removed from the main building.
Interim University Librarian Jean Ehrhorn said most of the stacks will be reopened today, with the exception of the Hawaiian and Asian collections and government documents, which will still have to be paged at the reference desk.
The entire library collection should be accessible within a few weeks.
Renovations at the library will continue through summer 2002, but "we're reopening so people have access to the stacks," she said. "It's staged so that we provide as much access during the academic semester" as possible, she said.
Readying the library last week was a major endeavor, Ehrhorn said, with movers in all week moving furniture, computers and everything else, as well as cleaning up afterward.
"Getting that all done by Monday will be fun," she said.
Ka Leo O Hawaii
University of Hawaii