[anitazavrrr]

As an undergraduate, I lived in dorms on campus until my very last semester. Even in library school my apartment was within a 15-20 minute walk of everywhere on campus I needed to be. Okay, I always saw students around campus who had commuted in for the day, and we would always have a few people sneaking naps in the “quiet study room” at Pitt Engineering, but I was largely blind to the plight of the student (or faculty member) who has time to kill between classes and nowhere to kill it.

A large number of our students take slow, expensive public transportation to and from campus, which means they arrive in time for their first class of the day and don’t leave until they finish their last. There is also nowhere other than our campus facilities in walking distance. Now, our students are certainly not all work all the time, but they mostly seem to be of the mindset that if they are stuck at school for a few hours between classes, they might as well use those hours to get their work done. The library is the place to go for this. We have ample tables and workspaces, but a large portion of our students don’t have consistant computer/internet/printing access at their homes, and for them it is critical to get any computer-dependent work done while they are on campus.

We’ve had our computer availability cut in half since the flooding incident a few weeks back, and the ensuing shortages have really opened my eyes to how vital it is that we offer consistent computer access for our users. The sheer lack of sufficient numbers of computers is certainly the biggest factor, but other issues have come into play as well. We’re located in an old train depot, and are physically limited as to where we can put computers – as it stands they are all located inside our two labs. What this means is that when one or both of the labs is in use or unavailable, there’s no other option for our users. Not even for a catalog search, or to quickly print an assignment. Finding a workaround for this situation is vital, in my opinion, and urgent.

Currently, we’re down to just one computer lab. There are two regularly scheduled classes that meet in one of the library labs this semester, so those get priority during their time slots and other patrons are unable to use the computers, print, etc. Additionally, we had other reservations for the labs from financial aid, the dean of academics, classes coming in for one-shot instruction sessions. Everyone has been as flexible as possible about sharing the space, but there have been at least 2 or 3 prime hours in the middle of the day, every day, that students have been unable to use the library computers.

Seeing the frustration on these students’ faces (and again I say students, but there are definitely a couple of adjunct faculty members who don’t have their own offices in this group) really struck me this week. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that it could be such a problem to have all of our public computers silo-ed off in this way. I want to see what we can do about moving at least one or two computers out into the main area of the library, and having those computers print to the front desk. Even if these were just 15-minute or similar short-use workstations, it would make a huge difference for our users. The thing is – we wouldn’t even need to buy any new equipment, just move an existing computer or two and figure out how we can run power from the few outlets we do have.

Next post will be a project update, but this was at the front of my mind this week.