Library Renovations

Situating Serendipity in the Research Process

Barbara Fister | August 13, 2015

One of the reasons library renovations are often controversial is that browsing for books seems to be pitted against creating spaces for doing other things – group work, study spaces, digital humanities labs, academic services like tutoring or writing centers. As library collections (and budgets) are increasingly devoted to digital resources, the argument for the essential need for browsing is harder to sustain as fewer books are added to the shelves. Particularly for libraries without historically strong collections or a healthy budget for new books, browsing isn't always rewarding. Some library catalogs have ways of browsing by classification, but we put more effort into being as Google-like as possible.

Source: http://acrlog.org/categories/buildings/

<more at https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/situating-serendipity-research-process; related links: http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Serendipity-gets-lost-in-renovation-on-the-1870968.php (Serendipity gets lost in renovation on the downtown library building. March 26, 2006) and http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2015/01/01/crl14-655.full.pdf (Serendipity in the Stacks: Libraries, Information Architecture, and the Problems of Accidental Discovery. Patrick L. Carr. December 17, 2014); further: http://acrlog.org/categories/buildings/ (Serendipity’s Not Just for the Stacks. September 8, 2014)>