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This past week, Mary Beth Lock, Mary Reeves, Steve Jarrett and myself made the quick jaunt down I40 to visit the newly completed auditorium/viewing room at Elon University’s College of Communication. Colleagues at Elon were kind enough to let us take a look at their facility so that we could get a mental image of the future construction of our own auditorium, hopefully sometime next year.

The facility was quite impressive, boasting a capacity of over 70 attendees over four tiered seating rows. Each of the seats had a folding desk attached, perfect for both academic use and more casual viewing. These seats curved around a wall mounted, permanent screen (the dimensions escape me at the moment, apologies) set up to directly play VHS tapes, Mini DV tapes, DVDs, and blu ray over a high def., wide screen projector. Completing the theater experience was a surround sound system mounted along the walls of the auditorium.

Pictures are available at the ZSR Flickr account.

We picked up several important tips, such as wall mountings to defuse the sound and prevent reverb, thought about what parts and equipment need to be open vs. locked down, etc. Mostly, it was nice to get a picture in your mind, since staring at a room full of stacks makes it hard to imagine anything resembling a auditorium!

We also made a quick stop at Elon’s Belk Library, wandering around for a few minutes and taking in how they do things. Particularly, we were interested in their DVD collection since a big part of the auditorium construction will be Mary Reeve’s move along with all our DVDs.

We arrived back at Wake with no problems thanks to Mary Beth’s mini-van expertise and powerful parallel parking proficiency. (Go Alliteration!) Also, a big thanks to Steve Jarrett of Communications for lending us his experience and directions.