Give them access and they will use it
This posting in the Register attracted my attention, especially the paragraph near the end:
Meanwhile, at Durham University the IT services department has taken action to reduce the amount of bandwidth swallowed by social networking. Our correspondent reports that action to deprioritise Facebook between 8.30am and 5.30pm “has lead to a rather remarkable drop off in the number of students in any of the university libraries”.
So if you deny access to one of the most popular social networking tools in the academic world, Facebook for students using PCs in the University Library, the usage of those terminals drops by up to 80%. Now there is a surprise!
What that tells us is that that during those hours, on a rough assumption that before the ban those PCs were 100% utilized, only 20% of a student’s PC time was for pure ‘library’ purposes. Following through that line of thought, as the PCs are now only 20% utilized, the Library have justification to remove eight out of every ten of them and regain some valuable floor space.
I may be being a little unkind with my analysis here, but I am trying to make a serious point. Libraries, especially in a University, are far more than a building full of books and journals. The librarians that work within them aspire to provide a safe, welcoming, environment where students can learn, enquire, and interact with the librarians, and their fellows. Take a look at the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University to be inspired as to how a library building can provided social, learning, and study spaces for the people that use it.
The physical aspirations of a Library should be reflected in that library’s on-line presence. The social interaction between between students online is of equal importance as their ability to socially interact within the building.
So no doubt they are now happy in Durham that there is no waiting to get on to a library PC, but are their users now getting more or less value from the service the library offers?
(Photo taken by alexmuller displayed in Flickr)
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