This is the first of a series of posts, that can be read in any particular order. It’s probably best to find the topics that are relevant to you and skip the others. The idea came for this blog after chatting with fellow librarians and listening to them complain about issues in their library spaces. Some of these were easily fixable, others a lot trickier to fix. If you are in the fortunate position to be designing a library or looking for ideas to change your current library space, this series of blogs is for you. Also, if you are simply looking for ideas to make changes or increase the traffic in your library space this could provide helpful suggestions. 

Please note that this can apply to any kind of library but I will be focusing on talking from the perspective of a school librarian.

Let’s get started… 

Library ReDesign Series: Noisy vs. Quiet 

It’s really important to the success of your library to consider what your library users actually need. This is different from what your users are currently using your library for. In a school library, you are a part of a much larger space. Your campus may have separate buildings. Different rooms will be used for specific activities. Your library may or may not get a lot of foot traffic based on where it is located on campus.

I highly recommend you walk around your campus. It’s worth the time! Try spending a few minutes everyday, at different parts of the day and observe for a week. Suggest your library staff do the same and see what they notice. 

What should you look for? 

Where are students hanging out during break times?

What are they doing?

Are they studying in comfortable spaces outside of your library?

Is it quiet? 

Is it noisy? 

Do they have study halls already blocked into their schedule, where they are studying in assigned rooms? 

Where do teachers host homework help/math help sessions? 

Where are after school activities located? 

What do students do in the morning before their first class starts? 

Where do teachers spend their time when not teaching in their rooms? 

Do people enjoy hanging out outdoors? 

Are you at a boarding school with evening study hall/weekend/evening activities, if so, what spaces are they currently using?

Next, 

Talk to people. I can’t stress this enough. Even with all the technology available, there is nothing more valuable than face to face interaction. As you walk around ask students and staff questions. For example, if you see a group studying, ask them why they picked that spot. What is it that they like about it?

Consider if you want to put out an online survey with open ended questions to get feedback. If you do this, I find it works best if you keep the survey short, the option for anonymity and with only open ended questions that will let them give you their full opinion. 

For example, you could use questions similar to this:

1. What do you like about the library space? / How do you feel when you are in the library?

2. What do you dislike about the library space? / Is there anything that you do not like about being in the library?

3. Do you wish the library was quieter? Do you wish the library was noisier? Why?

To be honest, unless you are at a massive school where it isn’t feasible for you to interact with enough people face-to-face, I don’t recommend doing a survey. Here’s why:

• most people hate taking the time to fill them out

• people also aren’t necessarily answering in ways that are going to provide you with useful information that you can use to make a change

• people are so busy with their routine that they don’t think about other ways that they could be using their campus. So, they aren’t in the right frame of mind to consider other possibilities that could make their experience better

• lastly, if people do have ideas that they think would be beneficial they tend to just tell you when they have that idea, or the next time they run into you. They don’t tend to hold onto that idea waiting for the day an online survey hits their inbox. 

So in my experience of having taken the time and carefully thought through survey questions, I don’t think my time spent has led to valuable insight gained. This isn’t true of all surveys, but surveys of this type I would try to avoid. 

What do you do now that you’ve collected all this information about how people use your campus and library space? 

All of these observations are really important to think about when considering changing your library space. The goal of any library redesign project, whether it be a huge renovation, to something smaller like simply rearranging what you already have, should be to focus on trying to find what your community needs.

Do they need…

A quiet space to study alone?

A place to work on group projects?

A place to practice presentations?

Privacy to have meetings with parents or one on one sessions with students?

Access to computers/electronic devices? Or does everyone have their own already?

Do they need a space to print? 

Another teaching space?

A place to bring guest speakers to the school?

A spot to host their after school activity?

You can see how redesigning your library space can quickly become really complicated. There are so many aspects to consider that it can quickly become overwhelming. I recommend thinking about how your students, teachers and parents currently use the school and how they currently use the library itself. Use this information to help guide you to change the library to how you think it would best serve your population. Do you notice any voids? 

For example, I recently worked at a school library where it became apparent that students didn’t have anywhere to practice presentations. This is a great opportunity to work one on one with students and many libraries have a solution for this. Is there a back office that could be used to listen to a student’s speech? Are there private meeting rooms? Is there a room nearby the library that you could utilize to work with students without interruption or distraction? At a previous school, I observed that students wanted help with reading through their student council speeches for the upcoming election. This was something that students didn’t even realize could be done in the library. After suggesting to some students who I overheard discussing this problem that I could one on one listen to their speeches in the private study rooms during their study hall times, they were ecstatic. It was only a couple of students, certainly not everyone, but for those students I think it made a big difference in their confidence when it came time to present to the entire student body. They were non-native English speakers, so I was able to offer them feedback on slight changes with their wording to make it more fluent and to help get their points across more concisely. After this, I had students who I previously hadn’t had much contact with asking me if they could practice major presentations with me before they had to do it in front of classmates. What a huge library win! 

Big Library Space Changes or Changes that Require Big Spending Suggestions:

If possible, run trials with the changes you want to make. 

You can move the furniture around, you can move books to completely different sections of the library, create new sections, make new displays, bring new furniture in, and anything else you can think of to change the atmosphere of that space within your library or the whole library itself. 

You might be surprised at how much furniture is around your campus that you could use to run a trial. For example, perhaps your school has chairs, tables, movable white boards, smart TVs on wheels, etc. hanging around the school that are used for special events, or that belong to a teacher but they perhaps aren’t in need of those pieces at that time. For example, a teacher may take students on a field trip (i.e. Week without walls event, college visits). If you have a good relationship with that teacher, perhaps they don’t mind if you borrow a white board from them, or a large table that you want to try out. Or maybe they only use that furniture when they are doing certain units (i.e. art display boards on wheels, these might only be used during special display times, gym teacher might have multiple areas on campus that are used for different sports, but these might not be used all year round, drama teacher may only need some furniture for specific plays/lessons). You know your school. You know who those teachers are. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

Next,

Observe how this changes the noise level in that space and surrounding space. Does it change the flow of people? Do they now need to walk through a different route? Is this better or worse for increasing circulation? For ensuring people enjoy their time in the area? 

One of the biggest consequences of moving furniture around is the change in traffic flow. This can lead to unexpected results, sometimes good, sometimes bad. It can really help to move furniture on wheels around and see what affect this has before making large purchases of permanent furniture that will be very difficult if not impossible to move later. I have tried this before with movable white boards when I was considering purchasing permanent large wooden book displays. Placing the white boards in that spot allowed me to see how people engaged with the change and notice how it obstructed my view of the rest of the library. 

Change is good! 

The great thing about libraries is how flexible they are. At this point you can easily tell if there were consequences that you didn’t think of. You can change the space back, or make modifications as needed. If you borrowed furniture and you feel like it made a big improvement, now you can safely justify adding it to your budget to purchase your own permanent pieces. You now are confident that the result will be positive for your school. This can also help you in a budget meeting if asked to provide more explanation. You have just given yourself evidence that it is a helpful and necessary purchase. 

Don’t be afraid to change your library’s space regularly. 

Consider spaces that are around your library too. Is there an outside space that you could utilize? Is there space outside the doors to your library that could also be used? If you want the library to be a quieter space, could you use spaces outside the library as noisier areas for people to enjoy a book or work on homework?

Adding Noise

Have you considered playing music in your library? At a previous library I worked at, we liked to play a variety of music near the circulation desk and printing area. We kept the music fairly quiet so you couldn’t hear it in other parts of the library space. The difference it made was notable. It definitely made the library feel more inviting as people entered. I was surprised at how much it seemed to lighten the mood, make us librarians seem more approachable and encourage conversation. Printing, a normally boring task was a little more fun. It was such a simple change that I didn’t think much of at the time, but I do believe that it really changed the atmosphere in a positive way. 

For finding music quickly, easily, and for free I recommend playing YouTube videos that are continuous music for a few hours, instead of playlists of YouTube songs. For example, this continuous jazz video requires essentially no maintenance on your part. It’ll just play. If you choose something that is a playlist of videos I find that there tends to be a far greater number of ads playing in between songs, which is very annoying. Of course if you pay for premium or a music service such as Spotify or Pandora this won’t be an issue. If you’re in China Youku does have a lot of great continuous music collections available too.

This is the difference between a playlist (shown to the left) and finding a video that continuously plays music (shown above). The one on the left is filled with very short songs that tend to have a lot more ads in between them, disrupting your music and making it annoying to manage. The one above does play ads also, but far less frequently and you can find videos that have hours and hours of continuous music making them very low maintenance through out the day. You just need a tab open on a computer running in the background while you work on other tasks.

Research backs the observation I made in my library. It’s already been conducted in supermarkets. It has been shown that playing music with a slow tempo, less than 72 beats per minute, encouraged people to linger longer in aisles. This led to a 38% increase in gross spending (Flax). Maybe this could lead to people lingering near bookshelves longer and encourage more reading. 

It’s okay for your library to be noisy. It doesn’t have to be a traditional quiet space where no one is allowed to do anything more than flip pages in books. If your users need space to talk, consider adapting your library to accommodate that. This could be for certain times of the day only. You can schedule your library to have quiet study times and noisy times. For example, lunch or recess times could be designated noisy times where students know that they can enjoy hanging out in the library together without being constantly shushed. This can make your job managing the library space a lot more enjoyable too. I would rather have people using my library than have a library that’s absolutely quiet because no one wants to use it.

Removing Noise

You can easily and inexpensively do a lot to reduce the noise in a space, or even in a section of a space. Moving furniture around to change the traffic flow, having set quiet times (or all the time as a library rule), or designating spaces as quiet spaces. To help make spaces quieter you can add rugs to absorb foot steps, chairs being scraped across the floor. You can also add pieces such as ceiling acoustic panels that will work to absorb noise. You can hang these from the ceiling, adhere them directly to it or attach these to walls. Something like this or this.

Main Take Aways…

Engage with your whole school and community to make decisions in your library.

Speak to people face to face whenever possible.

Don’t be afraid to change your library’s space regularly. 

Adding noise to your library space can be a good thing!

Additional resource

An amazing library re-design checklist has already been created by Nadine Bailey. I can’t top what she’s already done, so please check that out. Her blog is full of inspiring ideas, practical problem solving and interesting takes on challenges. I highly recommend taking a read through some of her other posts too. 

Work Cited

Flax, Peter. “Out-Smart the Super-Market.” Prevention, vol. 69, no. 8, Aug. 2017, pp. 60–69. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,shib&db=awh&AN=123849468&site=eds-live&custid=s8492860. 

Kendra Perkins

www.TheInspiredLibrarian.com

Note: This blog does contain affiliate links, however none of the products or services mentioned have paid me to mention them, they are simply things that I would actually recommend.