The Library Morphs

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The Learning Commons

The Library Morphs

4/1/2008

By John K. Waters

Yet as the Ohio State library renovation nears completion, its learning commons is emerging as a refinement of that model. Says Branin: "Our idea of what these 'commons' should be and do evolved along with the project. We wanted to make the space more vital and useful, so we watched the way our students were gathering information and working together. We also observed other libraries and the efficacy of their designs. All of that influenced our own."

That evolved design de-emphasizes services, and puts more weight on flexibility and student control. "As you go through the building, you can see how we translated the idea," Branin explains. "You can see highly flexible spaces that are easy to change: Very little is nailed down, and there's a lot of stuff on rollers. And, of course, there's a very robust wireless infrastructure and lots of places to plug in a laptop."

The revamped library also does an excellent job of blending the old and the new. The Grand Reading Room on the east side of the facility is very traditional, fitted out with oak chairs and the classic long reading tables dotted with lamps and lined up in rows. On the west side, however, an equally large new reading room is surrounded by glass and set up with contemporary furnishings assembled for flexible placement (see the 3D rendering). "We believe the building is big enough to provide a variety of experiences to the people who use it," Branin maintains.

Surveys show that some of the most productive learning spaces on campus are among the most disregarded: empty classrooms or "accidents of architecture" filled with cast-off furniture and yet crowded with students. Computer labs don't rate high on these surveys.

Shrinking Stacks

In a move that may surprise those outside the library sciences, Ohio State is reducing the number of books it keeps on-site from approximately 2 million to about 1.25 million, in order to make room for these new spaces. Branin believes that his university was one of the first major institutions of higher education to consider shrinking the amount of stack space. He considers the reduction to be a practical recognition of the growing amount of quality resources available online, and the impracticality of shelving an endless influx of books.

"If we had undertaken this renovation 20 years ago, the first thing we would have asked is: How much more space do we need for the stacks?" Branin says. "But we were crowding out the readers with the reading materials, and so we decided to try to create a better balance. We think 1.25 million is the right number: It allows us to hold the kinds of books that we really need, in the center of campus; the rest will be stored off-site and delivered on an as-needed basis. We were ahead of the curve on this one, and not everyone in the higher education community agreed with us at the time. But I think now it's pretty clear that it was the right decision. When we talked with the students about what the future library should look like, we received a lot of requests for flexible group-study areas."