Meeting Rooms Changes Beginning January 2024

The CALS team has been working behind the scenes to make your library experience even better. In the next few weeks, we are moving our event system to a platform called Attend, created by Communico. This means that our event calendar will look a bit different, but you will be able to sort events by category then email or print a list, so you have all the events that you’re interested in (much, much more on that later). Attend works in conjunction with another new service, Reserve, which we are currently training our staff on and anticipate introducing to the public in February. Reserve will allow meeting room users to book their rooms online. You will be able to log in and see the availability of all CALS spaces at once for a 3 month period and reserve the room that best serves your needs.

Since this will be a whole new system of booking, CALS management team sat down and looked at some of the regulations surrounding room rentals and made a few adjustments to better reflect how those spaces are being used now. There are two main changes – there is no longer a limit on how long a room can be rented, and all meeting rooms will be charged at a rate of $25 per hour, regardless of what the room is being used for. There is the possibility of having the fee waived for non-private events.

These changes will go into effect beginning January 1, 2024, any bookings made prior to this date will fall under the current meeting room rules. Rooms can be booked out as far as 3 months in advance; for instance, rooms booked now for February will be with the current rules in place.

Here are the highlights:

• All meeting rooms are charged at the rate of $25/hr.
• Locations that charge more for certain rooms have the freedom to continue to do so (this includes, but is not limited to, the meeting room on the 3rd floor of the Rock It! Lab, the Ron Robinson Theater, and when Main reopens, the Darragh Center which will be relocated to the 5th floor).
• There is no distinction between events serving food/drink and those NOT serving food/drink.
• There is no limit to how many hours in a row a patron may rent, within our guidelines/available hours.
• Bookings may not be made for events further than 3 months from the date of booking.
• All bookings will go through an approval process before being finalized, to ensure patron events fall within CALS’s guidelines.
• All reservations made before January 1, 2024, will be grandfathered in under the old guidelines and rates.