How to Design an Academic Library

Inclusive Approach

For any college considering major changes to its library, these eight recommendations will help set the team up for success.

1 – Lean on all constituents

Throughout the process, we lean on key collaborators. The building committee and library staff typically have a vision of revitalized place of research, learning, study, and socialization that cannot be realized in full without their input. Registrars play a role in evaluating classroom typologies available on campus and where gaps existed, as well as utilization rates. The student body is active in the process, in terms of early surveys, and participating in town hall and design meetings – they are also critical in providing post-occupancy feedback. We expect University planners, facilities teams and administration to push our design team to validate our recommendations with our peer review and benchmark data – we come prepared.

2 – Survey, survey, survey

The value of surveys cannot be overestimated. To get well-rounded representation, we canvas all of the populations that will be served (faculty, student, staff, and administration). Questions are subjected to trial runs and need to be asked in specific ways. For example, we don’t ask people to rate the importance of twenty-five projects. Rather, we may ask them to spend $100 on twenty-five projects. This way you they are forced to create priorities and we can clearly see what rises to the top.

3 – Build time in for technology testing and training

Don’t skimp on the schedule for installing, testing, commissioning, training, and troubleshooting—all of which needs to happen in a dust-free setting after construction is complete. Faculty cannot expect to walk into a high-tech active learning classroom on day one and hit the ground running; they need training!

4 – Pay attention to seat types and allocation

You can have as many seats in a library as there are undergraduates (although that would be a stretch!) but if the blend of seat types is misaligned with student expectations, they will not be used. A diverse blend of seat types is important. It is equally important to zone and distribute these within the building. A mezzanine should not be all a single seat type —all open tables, for example. Provide a diverse blend of seat types, distributed in a diverse manner, but clearly zoned within the building.

5 – Support social learning

The concept of “see and be seen” so often leveraged in campus centers and other student life settings has made the leap to libraries. What we refer to as “social learning,” or groups of students sitting together, with multiple devices, working on discrete projects, is dominating library space. So much of this generation is about group work, as well as being “alone together.” That is being reflected in the space, furniture, and amenities.

“Bad libraries build collections. Good libraries build services. Great libraries build communities.”
― R David Lankes

6 – Make room for silence

The pendulum has swung about as far as it can toward group work, collaborative study, and social learning. Most libraries retain quiet study floors intermingled with stack space despite the move away from solitary work. More recently, we have started incorporating quiet study rooms, often nested within more open floor plates composed of group work areas.

Despite the shift toward social spaces, libraries are not student centers. They are serious places of research and learning. Research and learning can be open, loud, and collaborative, but it cannot all be that way. Quiet (or silent!) spaces persist for good reason.

7– Create versatile spaces

The pace of technology change and the behavioral shifts it drives means that versatile spaces, easily adaptable from one mode to another while maintaining their intrinsic character, are instrumental to the future viability of the library.

8 – Invest in strategic partnerships

With collections increasingly available digitally, floor space for seating, collaborative work areas, and new “tenants” opens up. In the past decade, as programmatic diversity has exploded, libraries have forged new alliances and partnerships that add vitality to the library, create opportunities for new synergies, and increase the gate count. An explosion of partner programs has emerged within libraries – writing centers, centers for teaching and learning, tutoring centers, language labs, career centers, counseling centers, media centers, general use classrooms, among others --- all pointed toward student-scholar success.

The Jones Architecture Library of Academic Libraries

Approximately half the libraries in our database date from the last decade, and the balance from before that time. This 10-year window gives us a good inflection point that we use to understand current and established trends in library design and planning. Although concentrated in New England, the spectrum of academic libraries that we survey spans the country. Jones’ “library library” captures information ranging from hours of operation, volumes, periodicals, vintage or renovation history to detailed notes on partner programs. Key components include:

People. Our survey spans colleges and universities whose undergraduate FTE populations range from 1,500 to more than 40,000, with an average around 6,000.

Culture. Our survey includes small liberal arts colleges, private schools, public schools, major land grant universities, and military institutions. Each institution has a specific character and sense of place, and it is this rich diversity that can support the vast spectrum of student personalities that populate the American academic landscape. This cultural diversity can drive differentiation and unique conditions within the library that are best captured anecdotally. This is precisely why our methodology is to visit each campus in person so we can witness these conditions firsthand.

Seat Count. A critical benchmark for guiding our design process, we survey the total seat count in the library and evaluate that against the undergraduate FTE population.

Seat Type. More important than simple quantity, the blend of seat types is critical. For example, five hundred seats, 80% of which are study carrels, create a particular character for the library. To that end, we track seven seat types: carrels, desks, workstations, soft seating, open table, group study, and instruction. Shifts in this blend have occurred over the past 20 years. The trend toward more group study, soft seating, and instruction space is now well established, having moved away from carrels, desks, and workstations. Open table study (the classic “reading room” environment) remains a persistent model.

Service Point Administration. Existing library service points were historically distributed --- reference desk, circulation desk, and other specialty functions arrayed around the main floor and entry. Increasingly, we are seeing “super-desks” where the first point of contact for library patrons can answer 90% of the questions that may arise. This cross-trained point person can re-direct more specialized questions to the right librarian as needed. Not only a more efficient staffing model, it also gives clarity to patrons as they go to one place for everything.