Student Study Spaces in Libraries

Reinventing Study Spaces for Tech Savvy Students

Peggy Spear | October 30, 2015

In the 1930s, UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library was known as the place to go to get a date. In the 1980s, it was known as a place for socializing, mainly among the school’s Greek community.
In 2015, the library, while still an active meeting space, is becoming known as an intellectual hub or incubator, thanks to renovations currently happening to the venerable building. Libraries like Moffitt reflect a changing trend of student study spaces that are doing away with stacks of books (many are online, after all) and creating environments where students can prepare themselves for the rigors of the 21st century workforce.

Source: http://www.spl.org/prebuilt/cen_conceptbook/page18.htm

<more at http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Reinventing-study-spaces-for-tech-savvy-students-6601039.php; related links: https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/ (Library as Infrastructure. Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch the public library? June 2014) and http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/Andrews_Wright.pdf (Library Learning Spaces: Investigating Libraries and Investing in Student Feedback. Camille Andrews and Sara E. Wright. March 25-28, 2015, Portland, OR. [Summary: This paper will examine how students in academic libraries work collaboratively and individually, what they need in terms of furniture, technology and spaces, and how librarians can determine student needs. During a major library renovation in 2007, Mann Library—which serves the Colleges of Agriculture, Life Sciences, and Human Ecology at Cornell University—responded to students’ need for more group work spaces with the unveiling of a new collaborative center. Five years later, it was time for an upgrade. In the spring of 2012, our library’s learning technologies team began the next phase of space redesign by applying a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to find out what users at our research-intensive university now need to work most effectively. Through surveys, interviews, usability tests of collaborative technologies, and participatory design exercises, our team gathered feedback on the study behaviors and needs of students. We then used this data to help redesign our collaborative study spaces and assessed the results. Included in this paper are our research methods, the results and evolution of our space design and assessment efforts, and how the library has responded to that feedback.])>