IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2012 - 16

Below: The café is among the amenities enticing faculty and students to linger in the library; photography by Paul Turang. Images throughout courtesy of UClA.

store them elsewhere, they need to do coherent and useful things with the opened-up space. Librarians and designers are starting to consider how to program that space. We think it’s important for people to be next to books, to see books, to have access to books. Some libraries might work fi ne without having many or any books in them. You literally do not have to contain a single book to be a library these days. But what we learned during our renovation is that a library is all about the space. And the furniture, which is why we focused so much attention on it. I think there’s a lot to be invested in developing furnishings that support collaboration. Sounds like you need to team up with a manufacturer to launch a UCLA-designed collection! We actually did, in a sense. We were one of the first installations of Steelcase’s Media:scape. A faculty member from our graduate library school used the pod to gather with students before lectures; they were the first to use the system. A designer from the Steelcase studio come to spend the day with them, to observe the furniture in action, see what worked, what needs they hadn’t anticipated. For instance, it was initially set up to accommodate one kind of

laptop, but people had brought all different types. Is portable technology essential to how students work? How do you accommodate that? Our students told us that, yes, they have all these gadgets. But those who live on campus—about a third of the student body—leave for class at 7 AM and don’t get back to their dorms until 6 PM, and they don’t want to carry their stuff around all day. Which is why we have a fleet of loaner laptops. That is something that’s changed: Instead of having tons of desktops, we only have a few; we mostly loan laptops or people bring their own device. University libraries are sponsoring research to find out about what people do with their gadgets. Students have all this portable technology— a laptop, a smart phone, etc.—but we don’t know what they do with them all day long. So the University of Rochester hired an anthropologist to find out. It became clear that, at home, students were logged into multiple applications simultaneously. And whenever they were logged on, they were tempted to go to Facebook. They went to the library to log off and get away from Facebook. Undergrads typically want a place that’s quiet but where they aren’t alone, and where they can avoid all the social media that tempts them. I was going to ask how social media has affected your job. It’s very funny, because we still have to use those channels to reach students. Most libraries have someone on staff overseeing its social media. From our students, we hear a lot of, “You want us to email you? Nobody emails anymore!” So, where are you? We’ll go there. The library wants to be

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2012