From Library Babel Fish, December 7, 2011
A discussion list I’m on has recently been kicking around a university’s plan to put their faculty in cubicles rather than offices as several departments move into a renovated building. Obviously, this poses student confidentiality problems since faculty not only discuss academic work with their students but personal issues of all kinds. The plan calls for a few conference rooms that faculty can use, if they are free when the need arises. (I don’t know if our students are more retiring than most – I doubt it – but in my experience students have to screw up their nerve speak to their teachers out of class. The more they need to talk about issues, the less likely they will take the initiative. Having to find their professor among a maze of cubicles and then go hunting for a free conference room would make the bravest of them come up with a Plan B.) Apart from practical issues, what does a bank of cubicles for faculty say about the institution’s values? Will it say to faculty “you are interchangeable workers; don’t get too comfortable” and to students “your education is important to us; please hold until a conference room becomes available”. Of course, the increasing number of adjuncts who don’t get offices at all and what that says came up in this discussion, too.
Cubicles are among architectural markers of power relationships and the value we assign to people and their activities. It made me think about the messages library interiors convey to students about the nature of knowledge and their relationship to it. Last week, I found myself fascinated by Tim Sherrat’s observation that interfaces are sites of power. Similarly, the architecture of a library says a lot to its users about the position they hold in the realm of knowledge, as visitors, consumers, or as members of a discipline or a tradition.
Though the conventional wisdom these days about library spaces is that students want to be social, that group work and collaboration are how kids learn today, and that digital texts and digital tools will get used but printed collections won’t, students often disagree. I’ve heard more librarians talk about student demands for quiet and solitary spaces for study in the past year, perhaps because the information commons idea has become so standard it’s no longer an innovation. Recently a small group of students at the University of New Brunswick protested because their spiffy new library was too noisy, too public, and the books were squirreled away at the periphery. It wasn’t clear from the article that students wanted to read the books, but they wanted a quiet, serious place to study, and books were part of their idea of such a place.
A recent Project Information Literacy study found that students minimize technology use and try to unplug from their overly distracting social networks when working on projects or studying for exams. Last month, a couple of student speakers at a symposium on the future of the academ