In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Libraries Designed for Learning
  • Lori A. Goetsch
Libraries Designed for Learning, Scott Bennett. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 2003. 83 p., $20.00(ISBN 1-932326-05-7)

As resources and services become increasingly electronic, the relevance of the physical library on college and university campuses has been called into question. While the topic has been hotly debated in recent years, "library as place" remains central to most library users but often for different reasons than access to print collections. In this report for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Yale University Librarian Emeritus Scott Bennett reports the results of a survey of nearly 250 academic library directors and in-depth interviews with 31 individuals designed to explore how libraries have been repurposed to address new and emerging needs of the university community and to assess the decision-making processes that went into these transformations. His audience is academic librarians with facilities responsibility and academic administrators who are interested in considering the role library facilities play in the advancement of teaching and learning.

Bennett begins the report with an excellent overview, with supporting data, of the changes in and influences on higher education and information technology in the early 1990s and their impact on library facilities planning at that time. He concludes that libraries that were renovated in that decade were designed primarily with traditional factors in mind,such as collection growth. On the surface, this conclusion is not an earth-shattering one, but it is vital to Bennett's argument that teaching and learning, so critical to a higher education institution's mission, were not factored into library planning in any systematic way. [End Page 437]

This missed opportunity is elaborated in an extended discussion of the advent of the information commons in the 1990s. Bennett posits that the information commons, while certainly an innovative merging of library resources and information technology, falls short of meeting pedagogical goals. He advocates instead for the learning commons "built around the social dimensions of learning and knowledge and . . . managed by students themselves for learning purposes that vary greatly and change frequently." (p. 38) This shift from a librarian-defined to a user-defined focus is key to the continued relevance of alibrary of bricks and mortar in the twenty-first century.

In addition to the learning commons concept, Bennett offers several other recommendations resulting from survey and interview data to assure that library facilities are in concert with the institution's teaching and learning mission. These suggestions are not limited to space planning but encompass policy and cultural changes that challenge how librarians have traditionally perceived and approached their users. It is this more far-reaching analysis that makes Bennett's report truly valuable to facilities planners and administrators in academic libraries. Data tables and charts, a detailed description of the research methodology including the survey instrument, and a useful annotated reading list conclude the report.

The library as a community for collaborative learning and research is evolving; therefore, library and campus administrators must expect to commit resources to facilities planning for the foreseeable future. In that effort they would benefit from consulting this report and heeding its recommendations. Replication of this study a decade from now would provide an interesting data comparison as well as a test of Bennett's argument for more user-focused planning.

Lori A. Goetsch
University of Maryland, College Park
lgoetsch@umd.edu
...

pdf

Share