Library
Consulting
Portfolio

Fifty Years. Eight Hundred Projects. One Methodology.

A provost once called us three weeks before construction documents were due. The architect had produced a beautiful building. It had no processing room, no adjacency between the reference stacks and the new research commons, and a service desk positioned so that half the floor was invisible to staff. The program, it turned out, had never been written. We were brought in to retrofit institutional intelligence into a design that had moved too fast.

That story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the most common reason institutions call Aaron Cohen Associates. What you will find in this portfolio is the record of what happens when planning comes first: buildings that work on opening day and keep working for thirty years, digital collections that researchers actually use, service models calibrated to real patron behavior rather than aspirational diagrams.

Explore Aaron Cohen Associates' extensive library consulting portfolio, spanning 800+ projects across academic, public, government, medical, law, and school libraries. We offer a dynamic, forward-thinking approach to library consulting services, highlighting the transformation from traditional repositories to innovative learning ecosystems.

TL;DR

What this portfolio represents. More than eight hundred completed library planning engagements across every institutional sector — academic, public, government, medical, law, and school — built on a single consistent methodology: ground every spatial decision in behavioral evidence, then design the services before you design the building.

What distinguishes the work. Each project in this record began with a structured needs assessment and ended with a written program that the architect could actually build from. The portfolio is not a gallery of attractive interiors; it is a proof-of-method archive showing what defensible programming produces over five decades of institutional practice.

What you should take away. The transformation from traditional repository to innovative learning ecosystem does not happen through renovation alone. It requires a methodology that connects patron behavior, collection strategy, digital infrastructure, and capital evidence into a single, coherent document before a single wall moves. That document is what we produce.

Eight Hundred Projects. Every Institutional Type.

The breadth of this portfolio is not a marketing claim; it is a methodological asset. When a law library director asks whether a particular adjacency arrangement has been tried at a comparable institution, the answer is almost always yes, and the case history is in our files. The same is true when a university provost needs to understand how a comparable research commons performed five years after opening, or when a municipal library board wants to know what a renovation of their scale typically costs in programmatic disruption during construction.

Browse the full project record by sector below. Each list represents a sample of completed engagements; additional projects are available on request.

• College & University Libraries — academic planning, learning commons, research commons, collection consolidation
• Public Libraries — community needs assessment, branch network planning, capital campaign support
• Government Libraries — security-conscious space planning, agency-specific collection management, service point redesign
• Law Libraries — adjacency planning, access control, collection density, courthouse integration
• Medical Libraries — clinical workflow support, evidence-based design, digital integration for health sciences
• Private School Libraries — curriculum-aligned space programming, age-appropriate zoning, flexible learning environments
• Special, Corporate & Research Libraries — knowledge-flow optimization, retrieval speed, security architecture

From Traditional Repository to Innovative Learning Ecosystem

Innovative library design is not about aesthetics. It is about understanding how knowledge moves through an institution — from acquisition, through organization, to discovery and use — and designing every physical and digital system to accelerate that movement rather than impede it. This is what we mean when we describe the transformation from traditional repository to innovative learning ecosystem.

Digital transformation in the library context means rethinking every workflow that currently depends on a physical artifact or a staff intermediary, and deciding deliberately which of those dependencies should remain, which should be automated, and which should be eliminated. Our work in digital library development and digital asset management addresses each of these decisions in sequence.

Academic space optimization begins with enrollment data and ends with a space program in which every square foot is justified by a measurable use pattern. We do not recommend open collaborative zones because they are fashionable; we recommend them when the behavioral data shows that students are currently using corridor floors and café tables to do the work that the library's interior has not accommodated. See our framework for academic library planning from enrollment data.

Collaborative learning environments require more than furniture rearrangement. They require service-point repositioning, acoustic zoning, technology integration at the workstation level, and staff training that shifts reference practice from reactive transaction to proactive instruction. Our service point planning methodology addresses each of these dimensions.

Technology integration is a planning problem before it is a procurement problem. We map current and projected workflows, identify the infrastructure gaps that will prevent new technologies from being used as intended, and produce a technology roadmap that the institution can execute in phases without stranding capital investment. Our library technology roadmap consulting practice documents this method.

An Intelligent Tool for Library Space Planning

This portfolio page includes access to an interactive AI planning tool developed to support early-stage library space planning and facility transformation conversations. The tool draws on the full body of Aaron Cohen Associates' methodological frameworks — needs assessment, space programming, service-point planning, collection projection, and digital infrastructure mapping — and makes them accessible in a guided conversational format.

It is not a replacement for a full consulting engagement. What it does is give institutional decision-makers — directors, trustees, provosts, facilities officers — a structured way to surface the planning questions they should be asking before they engage an architect, before they commission a feasibility study, and before they put a capital request to their board.

The tool is designed to reflect the voice and methodology of this practice: authoritative, specific, grounded in case history, and resistant to the kind of generic design-trend advice that produces buildings that look right in a rendering and fail in practice. Use it to begin a conversation about your institution's planning challenge, then bring that conversation to us.

For more on how this practice integrates analytical tools into its planning process, see our work on bibliometrics for strategic library planning and our library strategic analytics consulting practice.

Strategic Library Planning Built on Defensible Evidence

The projects in this portfolio share a common foundation: every recommendation was grounded in data that the institution itself could verify, challenge, and defend to external audiences. This is not a methodological preference; it is a practical requirement. Capital campaigns fail when their underlying space programs cannot withstand the scrutiny of a bond counsel, a provost's budget office, or a facilities committee that has seen too many optimistic architectural projections fall apart in construction.

Our evidence base typically draws from three streams: circulation and collection-use data analyzed bibliometrically; patron behavior observations conducted through structured visual scanning of the existing facility; and comparative institutional data drawn from projects of similar type, scale, and mission. When these three streams converge on a single space program, that program is fundable. When they diverge, the divergence tells you where the institution's assumptions need to be revised before any capital commitment is made.

For the full account of how we build the evidence base for a capital project, see Library Capital Planning: Building the Evidence Base for a Bond Campaign. For the bibliometric strand of this methodology, see Bibliometrics for Strategic Library Planning. For the visual scan methodology, see How Library Consultants Assess Facility Performance.

This practice has never recommended a building program it could not defend to the institution's most skeptical internal audience. That record is what this portfolio represents.

Not Every Library Faces the Same Problem

A courthouse law library and a university research commons share a planning methodology, but almost nothing else. The law library's adjacency requirements are driven by judicial workflow and security protocol. The research commons is driven by the intersection of enrollment growth, collection consolidation, and the need to support graduate interdisciplinary collaboration in a single environment. Treating these as variations on a single template produces buildings that work adequately in both contexts and excellently in neither.

This practice has worked across all major library sectors for more than fifty years because we begin each engagement by identifying what is genuinely specific to this institution's type, mission, and community — and what can legitimately be informed by comparable case histories from our project record.

• Academic libraries: enrollment-driven space programming, learning commons, digital literacy infrastructure, collection consolidation. See academic library design and college library design consulting.
• Public libraries: community needs assessment, branch network optimization, capital campaign development. See public library design consulting.
• Law libraries: adjacency to legal practice, access control, collection density, digital transition. See law library consulting.
• Medical and biomedical libraries: clinical workflow integration, evidence-based design, regulatory compliance, digital infrastructure. See medical library facility planning.
• Special collections and archives: preservation environment, security architecture, researcher access, digitization lab planning. See museum and special collections planning and archival facility planning.
• Corporate and research libraries: knowledge-flow optimization, retrieval speed, security architecture. See library design consulting for corporate and research environments.