Cornerstone:
Library Building
Program Builder

TL;DR

Cornerstone turns a library's program needs into a fully calculated building document — every department, room, and square foot — grounded in the AC standard methodology. It is the only tool built from the same reference program that a planning consultant would bring to your first architect meeting. Five free planning calculators are included, so you know your numbers before anyone draws a line.

A director calls us after the bond campaign has already passed and the schematic drawings are on the table. The architect has sized the building from a rough headcount and a comparable-projects spreadsheet. The numbers feel plausible. But when we sit down and work through the actual program — service by service, room by room, using the net-assignable-square-foot key — the total is consistently fifteen to twenty percent larger than what the design documents show. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a building that works for twenty years and one that is overcrowded in five. Cornerstone exists to close that gap before the architect is ever hired.

Turn a library's needs into a fully calculated building program: every department, room, and square foot, grounded in a standard methodology and a net-assignable-square-foot key. Describe your library and get a working program you can test, refine, and hand to an architect.

Three Sample Programs, One for Each Library Type

The most effective way to understand what Cornerstone produces is to read a finished program. Each sample below is a complete, calculated building program for a different institutional type. They are real outputs, not illustrations. Read them the way a director or a trustee would read them: look at the department list, check the room-by-room square footage, and ask whether the total makes sense for a library of that size and mission.

These samples also serve as benchmarks. If your institution is a community branch and your current building is significantly smaller than the Maple Grove program, you have the beginning of a capital case. If your liberal arts college library is larger than the Hollis program suggests it needs to be, you have a space-reallocation conversation worth having. Numbers are only useful when you have a standard to measure them against. These samples are that standard.

• Maple Grove Branch Library — public, community branch. A worked example for municipal directors preparing a renovation or replacement feasibility study. See how a community branch program is structured department by department, from the children's area through the community meeting room to staff workrooms and mechanical space. This sample connects directly to our work in public library design consulting.

• Hollis College Library — academic, liberal arts college. A worked example for academic administrators, provosts, and building committees beginning a capital conversation. The Hollis program shows how enrollment data, curriculum trajectory, and digital collection strategy translate into square footage. Read alongside our guidance on academic library planning and college library design consulting.

• Calder Historical Research Library — independent research library. A worked example for institutions managing special collections, rare materials, and archival holdings alongside active research access. The Calder program reflects the environmental, security, and adjacency requirements that distinguish a research library from a general-use facility. See related guidance in special collections planning and archival facility planning.

T-05 Project Readiness Scorecard

Answer fifteen questions. Get a score out of 100, your project stage, and what to do next. The Readiness Scorecard is the tool that tells you whether you are ready to hire an architect — or whether there is methodological work to do first. Most failed library capital projects fail not because the building was designed badly, but because the institution was not ready to make the decisions that a building program requires. This scorecard makes that visible before money is committed.

The fifteen questions cover governance readiness, program clarity, community engagement status, funding framework, and technical prerequisites. The score maps to a project stage: exploratory, pre-feasibility, feasibility, programming, or design-ready. Each stage comes with a specific list of what to address before moving to the next. It is the most direct path from "we think we need a new building" to "we are ready to make a defensible capital case." See how readiness connects to library capital planning consulting and library strategic analytics.

When the Numbers Raise Bigger Questions

Bring them to us. Your results come with you. Cornerstone is designed to produce a document that travels. The program output, the calculator results, and the readiness score are all structured so that a director can walk into a consultation with Aaron Cohen Associates and have a substantive technical conversation from the first minute. We do not start from scratch. We start from your numbers.

The questions that surface during the programming process — why is the children's area undersized relative to circulation patterns, what happens to the reference collection over fifteen years, how does the seating mix shift when the institution moves to a learning commons model — are the questions that our consulting practice is built to answer. Fifty years of engagements across academic, public, government, and specialized research environments have produced a body of methodological knowledge that no calculator can fully capture. When you are ready for that conversation, we are ready to have it. Contact Aaron Cohen Associates or explore all our free planning tools.

Why a Standard Matters More Than a Template

Every library planning tool on the market produces a template. Cornerstone produces a program. The difference is methodological. A template gives you a form to fill in. A program gives you a document that traces every square foot back to a service decision, a collection projection, or a staffing requirement. When a trustee asks why the building needs to be that size, a program can answer the question. A template cannot.

The AC standard was developed through direct engagement with hundreds of library planning projects across institution types and geographies. It reflects not just what libraries look like today, but what they have needed to become over time — from the shift away from card catalogs to the emergence of digital collections, from closed stacks to open learning commons, from single-purpose reading rooms to flexible multi-use environments. The standard accommodates those transitions because it was built by watching them happen in real buildings, in real communities, with real budgets.

That history is what makes Cornerstone different from a spreadsheet. It is not a calculation engine. It is a methodology made accessible. For directors who want to understand the full depth of that methodology before or alongside using the tool, the following resources from our practice are directly relevant: library planning fundamentals, what a library consultant does, how consultants assess facility performance, and the full range of our consulting services.