Osgoode Hall Law School faculty, students and staff have received the first official word about the move back to the new and improved Osgoode building.
“We are very excited to initiate the Osgoode on the Move Project,” Osgoode Dean Lorne Sossin said in an e-mail message to members of the Osgoode community regarding the school’s building, which has been undergoing a $50-million renovation and expansion since September 2009. “We appreciate our temporary offices in the Ross and TEL buildings, but we are looking forward to moving back to our new and improved home.”
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| Above: Osgoode Hall Law School following its renovation and expansion as presented in this architectural rendering |
Sossin said the building project is progressing well and the projected building occupancy date at the moment is Aug. 2. “Although we understand that there are inevitable uncertainties associated with the construction project, we are actively planning to move most of us back to the Osgoode building in August,” he said.
In his message to the Osgoode community, Sossin noted that faculty offices on the third and fourth floors of the Osgoode building will be ready in June or July and interested faculty members will have an “advanced move option” if they wish to pack up their belongings in May or June to be moved in June or July.
Right: Lorne Sossin
Sossin also said that, because the law library’s collections are currently dispersed over five separate locations, its move back will be done in stages.
The first stage will begin the first week of May, right after exams have ended, when the collections currently stored in the off-site warehouse in Bolton, Ontario and two other locations will start to be moved back. These are collections of law reports, statutes and bound periodicals that are currently inaccessible to users and will continue to be inaccessible until the new library opens officially at the end of August.
“Though this stage of the move will last four to six weeks, it will be invisible to users and will not affect Osgoode library services or current access to the Osgoode text collections – [i.e.,] the parts of the Osgoode collection currently available on the fourth floor of the Scott Library or by request from the library catalogue. The temporary Osgoode Library Services facility in the Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies Building [HNES] will continue to be open and operating as normal,” Sossin said.
The second stage of the move will begin on July 25, when the law school will start moving the law library’s open-stack text collection (from the fourth floor of the Scott Library), the request text collection (from another on-site location), and the reference and reserve collections in HNES.
Sossin said that the second stage of the move will require closing the law library. “The Osgoode collections will not be accessible, not even by request, after July 25 until the new library opens in the last week of August,” said Sossin.
He added that limited library services – reference services and research assistance for faculty and graduate students – will continue to be available by e-mail to lawref@osgoode.yorku.ca, by phone at 416-736-5207 and in person by appointment with individual librarians.