In a bind
State of the library: Part 1 of 3
Melissa Welshans glared at the group of boys horsing around at the table in front of her.
Welshans had just carried a heavy case of magazines to a relatively quiet area on the fifth floor of E.S. Bird Library. As a graduate student in the English department, Welshans needed to reference early publications of the American Association for University Women for a paper, but they were reserve materials that couldn’t leave the library.
Welshans thought the upper levels of Bird Library would be most quiet, but the boys talked loudly about an upcoming party instead of working on their math project.
She lowered her head, trying to block out the noise. But a few minutes later, Welshans decided to give up. She could not concentrate while they were using the library to socialize.
She hauled the case of magazines back to the shelf and left.
Welshans knew she needed to refer to the magazines again to complete her paper, but she had no choice than to come back another day, when she would not be distracted by a group of undergraduate students.
Undergraduate and graduate students use the library’s resources in conflicting ways – generally graduate students for heavy research and undergraduate students for general studying and group projects. Because of these differences, the administration at Bird Library is finding it increasingly difficult to provide a space that balances the social and academic needs of the Syracuse University population. The library’s lack of funding for expansion endeavors is also hampering these advances.
‘There is such a wide variety of needs and styles, but everyone is competing for the same space,’ said Lisa Moeckel, the associate dean for undergraduate education.
But Welshans said she believes the library is more focused on catering to the needs of the undergraduate students than the needs of graduate students like herself and those of faculty members.
The learning commons, or the first three floors of the library, is attractive to the undergraduate students, and it is important that they have an area to do collaborative work, Welshans said. But graduate students and faculty have less of a need for a large collaboration space, so it should not have to be in the library, she said.
‘As the library becomes more crowded and more noisy, I’ve definitely started going to other places,’ Welshans said.
But some people are belittling and underestimating the undergraduate students, said Savanna Kemp, a junior English and textual studies and women’s and gender studies major.
Undergraduate students may not have to do hefty research projects, Kemp said, but many take their studies as seriously as graduate students.
Kemp also said she thought Bird Library was treating the learning commons as a priority, but it should not be the case.
Bird Library tries to provide an environment in which students can work best, Moeckel said, and different floors accommodate different needs. The issue was discussed during the ‘What is a Library?’ forum on Feb. 12.
During the weekdays, students have 24-hour-a-day access to the learning commons’ computer workstations, service desks and the Quiet Reading Room.
Some students have complained about the noisy work areas and inadequate research resources, Moeckel said, but the upper levels are being improved to increase the availability of resources and quiet study options not provided on the lower levels.
It appears that current resources are being used to full capacity. The number of people using the library has increased, workstations are almost never empty and there is always a demand for more plugs, she said.
The learning commons bring everything together and provide a ‘one-stop shopping’ area, where every resource is available in one spot, Moeckel said. She added it’s also used for students working on group projects.
Instead of using the lower three levels of Bird as learning commons, Welshans proposed developing the empty dining center in Haven Hall into a collaborative learning area and improving Carnegie Library to meet some of the needs that cannot be met at Bird Library.
Since it is the part of Bird Library with the most traffic, it is understandable that people are largely influenced by what they see on the first floor, Moeckel said. But the development of the learning commons is only the first step in a series of steps the library administration is taking to meet the needs of its users, she said.
‘We would like to change the perception of the library as exclusively a social spot,’ Moeckel said.
Bird Library will gradually implement new changes to support more needs of all its users if and when it receives funding, said Charlotte Hess, the associate dean for research, collections and scholarly communication.
Funding will allow the library to develop a new research reading room, build a research support center for students to work with subject specialists, and enforce rules that will turn the third, fourth and fifth floors from quiet floors to silent floors, Hess said.
But funding for more resources and buildings for the library may not come as soon as students and faculty would like. Bird Library has consistently been an underfunded part of the university and needs a budget that will support its role as a research facility, Welshans said.
Few users are satisfied with the available research resources, Hess said. There is not enough funding to buy the journals, databases, monographs and collections that support scholarly research, she said.
‘We should not have to have a faculty member or student say he cannot do research because the library cannot afford the resources,’ Hess said.
The library needs to develop a good partnership with its users to help address this problem, said David Lankes, the director of the Information Institute of Syracuse and an associate professor at the School of Information Studies.
The resources for the information studies department improved after it worked directly with the library, Lankes said. Faculty and students from the department sat down with the library staff and discussed what resources they needed and wanted, he said.
A team of library specialists is currently working with 10 to 15 different departments at SU to address the concerns of the inadequate research materials, Hess said.
The library has recently begun collaborating with the science department, which has expressed concerns about the quality of images and databases in physical and electronic collections provided by the library, Hess said.
‘The most important thing is to get more money to the library,’ Welshans said. ‘The university has a responsibility to give Bird Library a funding to make research the more prominent duty of Bird … With increased funding, everything will run more efficiently.’
Published on March 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm
