Bissett Collaborative Center

Students welcome spaces that foster high-energy group brainstorming. They also favor high-tech tools for capturing their ideas, sharing them with group members, and pulling together a project for presentation to a wider audience. With the opening of the new building, Mann’s patrons will find all of this at the Kenneth J. Bissett ’89 Collaborative Center. Mann staff worked with faculty and students from the Cornell Department of Communication and the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis to develop this exciting new space. Located on Mann’s 2nd floor in what was originally the library’s card catalog room, the Bissett Center will feature “Knowledge Bars” (high tables with stools grouped around large LCD screens capable of displaying group work from individual laptops), movable tables and chairs that can be instantly rearranged to accommodate any group, and mobile workstation carts equipped with state of the art technologies.

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This space honors the memory of Bissett, a CALS student tragically killed in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Bissett was a communication major at Cornell, and we like to think it likely he’d have approved the establishment of a center that will enable some exciting uses of collaboration-building information technology by students from a myriad of backgrounds and fields.

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