The Library Morphs

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The Learning Commons

The Library Morphs

4/1/2008

By John K. Waters

The second floor houses the reference desk, a service desk, two classrooms dedicated to information literacy instruction, and a computer lab. The third floor is dedicated to individual and group study rooms. "Students who are working on projects can go up there, bring their laptops, plug them in, and work together," Menzel says. Here again, the notion of a library with "book-free zones" might go against the grain of many, Bennett says, but it's just part of the evolution of the library building. "As a librarian, I think we ought to celebrate the digital information revolution," he says. "We ought to celebrate the way in which librarians have worked very aggressively to move information resources out of the library building and into the individual work spaces of students and faculty."

Yale's groundbreaking Librarian Emeritus Scott Bennett explains that though people talk about integrating the services delivered by librarians, information technologists, and even student tutoring services, "The result can be a useful space that integrates these services, but it's still a space in which the service providers call the shots. We're very slow to break away from that model and admit that what these spaces should be about is the students taking responsibility for their own educations."

New Learning Spaces

Bryan Sinclair, associate university librarian for public services at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, agrees with Bennett on this point, though he's not big on consultants. "When the Google Book Search project is finished, who knows what will happen to these beautiful buildings," he says. "But students will always need a place to congregate and collaborate for learning. Maybe we'll have a Star Trek-like holodeck that allows them to work in a 19th century library with long oak tables, or float in a high-tech 3D model. Whatever it looks like, a librarian will be there." Working with others at the university, Sinclair developed a plan to renovate UNCAsheville's D. Hiden Ramsey Library about a year ago. "We won't be bringing in a consultant," he says, "but we've gathered teaching faculty, students, and others on campus who have a really good understanding of what we're trying to do, and we're figuring it out for ourselves."

At the heart of the plan is Sinclair's concept of "Commons 2.0," which he laid out in an article published last year. "I thought I might have been stretching the Web 2.0 connection a bit," he admits, "but it seemed to me that what we're seeing in these real-world collaborative interactions among students reflects what we're seeing online in Web 2.0 social networking situations." Sinclair hastens to add that the renovation was not prompted by low "gate counts" at the library. He characterizes the Ramsey Library as an attractive and popular facility, with an excellent media collection. People are still coming, he says, but what they're doing there is changing.