User Centerd Spaces #2

This would appear to be a proactive attempt to meet the needs of the very tech savvy students entering college today. It provides them with the electronic resources they prefer and keeps the library as a place for them to study and socialize. Combined with specialized librarians and IT staff the facility appears to be designed to meet the needs of the 21st Century student. Books are gone, yet, just not at this one library on the campus. However it should also be mentioned that the University has join the Google effort to digitize all of their books.

I have been a book lover all my life but recently I purchased a Kindle and I have to say it is wonderful. Except for the fact that not everything is available yet in Kindle format I would switch completely. Two main reasons are “zero eyestrain” and no dusting required.

User Centered Spaces #1

Before being renovated in 2005 the undergraduate library in the Flawn Academic Center at the University of Texas at Austin housed some 90,000 volumes. In a radical jump into the future library all the books but the reference collect was sent to other campus libraries or storage areas freeing approximately 6,000 square feet of space.. Replacing the books are many individual and group study areas equipped with computers, internet connections and other high tech resources. The idea is to create a learning commons modeled after Barnes and Nobel bookstores with their Starbucks coffee shops. The students have access to a large number of electronic resources and the new facility is staffed with Internet savvy librarians and IT support people. Books are still available at the other libraries or can be retrieved from storage. The campus libraries add approximately 200,000 new books per year but with shelf space at a premium 200,000 books must be placed in storage to offset the new ones. Because of this the students are already accustom to waiting for books from storage and not being able to browse the shelves for everything.

The renovation was a daring step forward that follows in the footsteps of other schools such as University of Southern California, Emory University, and University of Michigan who have all built such digital learning centers.