 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third and final session in the University of Florida Library Spaces Workshop Series. I am Sue Boffman from the Association of Research Libraries and very pleased to welcome everyone this morning. Whether you've joined us for one or both of the first two sessions or just joined us today, we have benefited from learning about the University of Florida team library spaces research project. During the last session, and just now several of you have mentioned how you could use what you're learning to take back to your library. I want to acknowledge that the workshops are brought to you under the auspices of the Research Library Impact Framework Initiative and I'm also pleased to note that funds from our IMLS grant have supported this theory. Excuse me. We will record today's session and we will share all of the recordings next week. So finally, I want to add a special thanks to the University of Florida team, Laura Spears, Val Minton, Meg Portillo, Jason Manili, and Adrienne Del Monte who I just noticed is joining us from the Philippines for their contributions to this workshop theory and our LIF initiative. So thank you again for joining us and I look forward to today's workshop. So with that, let me turn the podium over to you, Val. Thank you, Sue. So let me just say Adrienne, thank you for coming. It's the middle of your night and we are so glad that you're here and appreciate your attending. So our team is thrilled to be hosting this last session in our series. Our first two sessions covered the methodology of our four-part study and then our second session, Explored Ways to Partner with Interior Design Students and Jason Manili presented at that session. Today we're going to, you can go to the next slide. Today we're going to chat about how to take a research question. So one that we come at with hidden assumptions, ideas about how our space should be designed and we're going to develop a plan of attack or a plan of action and then develop from that action an effective model. So we're going to also go into a bit more detail about our Creativity Index instrument and our findings and then we're going to close out with the benefits on the library side and the benefits on the design construction and planning side which is where Meg's from on collaborative partnerships just sort of as a around sort of a closing of the loop because ultimately I think that partnership has helped us, has been the foundation of of our work and and the results of of our renovation which I might add they I just got a text that said we are breaking ground this morning on our fourth and fifth floor renovations which have been totally driven by this research and I have to in the afternoon move carols with my facilities people because it was it's spur of the moment. Anyways okay so the next three slides these slides are just a visual reminder of where we left off so Jason had shared in that last presentation that last workshop had had shared the student work right and this is sort of how students see the library space and and what they had recommended for renovations and so we think that's a really important stepping off point to our what I call beating a dead horse which is we are going to share with you are in this third in this third series our project in its full glory and the next slide which is all about our research question right that's what we start with how do we take this question and then and make it into a scalable model how do library spaces facilitate innovative research creative thinking and problem solving and I will tell you that this project went a completely different direction than I had expected it to when we first applied for that for the ARL research library framework and so I think I'm really proud of of where it's gone and I'm going to hand this off to Meg. Absolutely thanks so much Val for that nice setup so again how do we go from the research question you know into action and then potentially how what meaning does that have for for you who are interested in reimagining and maybe moving into renovating and developing your own spaces so you know essentially we went through this model and our research model again all of our lives to various degrees were impacted by living through and we're still within this pandemic period and and there was impact on this process but essentially our launch point was developing the idea and and there as with any construct any complex construct there are many ways of defining and operationalizing the construct and very early on we knew we wanted more of a holistic approach to creativity that not only recognized those students who were in the carols that sounds like Val will be and team will be starting to pull out of this space today but thinking creativity not only exists in the individual but it exists in the team and and creativity is a normally distributed trait that can be developed in all people not just the geniuses that have really shifted our own fields so um then we started to really see where were the hotspot we wanted to know um what spaces where were the hotspots within the spaces where did there seem to be um more demand than than than then you know seating um where where were areas and likewise where were areas that were under utilized so um as Adrian led uh Adrian Del Monte uh led the charge on the the behavior mapping portion of this study so uh looking also at the time periods we wanted uh we had data that showed when the library was most in use so that um time period was analyzed as well as a lower use period and then from that we developed profiles of those user types so it would be an individual working in a carol or an individual working in a space designed for teams and spreading out or and we started um when we almost had the the time lapse of all of these floor plan images you could start to see um it it was very interesting how this how the space um was moved over over the time period which we collected data also central to our study design and I know it's important um for this group it's questions have bubbled up um in in our previous two workshops how important it is not to make um assumptions about the end users um we know their individual differences um but also um undergraduates and graduates as well as um the staff who worked in this space all had very useful insights and had some specific needs and that was critical to go through um so the survey gave us a broad swath of responses and we had um over 300 respondents and we were pleased with that we did offer uh we incentivized this I think we had a coffee card um as an incentive for participating you know in in the surveys and then the focus groups allowed us to start you know really delving into some of those findings so we got a feeling of um more nuanced responses to some of the broad data that that's bubbled up from the surveys and then um as Val had pointed out those three samples of slides you saw the students really did work with the data from this study so it would be evidence-based design as opposed to taking more of an intuitive approach to design so the students were actually evaluated graded they were held accountable and midpoint reviews um by faculty and by other professionals in the department on actually meeting the criteria that were put forth um by our research teams okay next slide please so again um as I alluded to and all of you have have have your own um challenges and travails from COVID some of the there was an impact um on this study and just let me share um a few points of of impact so essentially um having having uh maintaining spatial distancing reduced the number of students that could be in the library it was it was at 34 percent capacity um maintaining a CD following CDC guidance maintaining health safety and welfare really prompted you know the space to be shifted in in in a way you know the plexiglass barriers started going up there was an expectation for masking and social distancing um in fact our study um we needed to shift um the data collection to the fall because there was a time period that spaces um were were fully closed and our original idea was our original study design was to do an intercept interview uh or you know intercept survey so what would what this would mean would be students that were working in in in these different spaces throughout the library our whole research team I think we had about eight people um fully engaged we had several um graduate students that were also involved at different levels Adrian being the primary leaders who was finishing his doctorate but um you would go and and and talk to students we would all have a standardized survey form but they would be able to give impact on what was working in this space what was what was not um any suggestions and we had developed an intercept survey so they could literally look around and in real time give us information but that was not possible to do with maintaining good practices um in a pandemic so we did focus groups and you'll see later Laura's going to show you we did show them images of the library and they were able to pick you know these are areas I study in and then they were able to critique and provide feedback from those areas then there also was an app put in place where uh students or anyone uh could download an app and for example we are still using this and I and I think it's a great tool I've personally heard back from students it's kind of nice to see how many people are in the library and um what percentage um occupancy that you see and this is something um that it seems like will be used in the foreseeable future students like it it seems like uh the powers that be in the library like it and it it's um it's it's been well used okay next slide please so essentially we had talked about this earlier but we were taking this holistic approach to wanting to elevate and create conditions that uh are conducive to creative thinking problem solving both by students um working individually um as well as as when they're working with a partner or working in a small group and again um we know that the pandemic really the expectations for maintaining physical and psychological feelings of safety and protection were important and what we know from Abraham Maslow and we know from the research is you have to have those base physiological and security needs satisfied for you to be able to move into higher level um thinking and problem solving and and and creativity which is which is closer to the apex of Maslow's pyramid so again you the point being is if you're cold or hungry or you feel really unsafe in the space there are too many people encroaching in your area you're not going to be able to really think creatively there's a cognitive dissonance so we needed to make sure that that alignment was in place and so again as I have mentioned um our study was premised on the fact um that we were going to look at creativity and the individual in group and also that creativity spans a process we'll we'll take a quick look at the classic um Wallace model that is still really in use with adaptations today and we know that um research shows that certain spaces can help um create a sense of place and and promote development and and knowledge acquisition and application and then create even a larger sense of belonging which is important and and really did was reinforced with our focus group findings so choice and control became important to this creative ecology that when you're looking at these different embedded spaces within the library that um if you're working for a long block of time you know maybe three or four hours or more that you're able to satisfy those those more base needs the physiological needs you you have a sense you have sight lines you can you can sort of see exits people coming and going you don't feel so isolated that you feel sort of vulnerable like something could happen you know to you or you could get up for a minute and your laptop would be gone and you know that has to happen you want that choice and control there might be a certain part of the day that you're wanting to do more ideation and brainstorming you want to be in a in a soft chair near a window looking out at outside at some of the the pine and palm trees that we have throughout our campus and other times you may want to be in um uh environment that really limits the stimulation um and at any rate so choice and control really did have um play a tremendous role in creating um the environment and and and drivers for the student work um insurance next slide okay and we have seen this is uh this is the work directed by Dr. Del Monte and over time again you start to to feel that flow of where the individuals are located where the groups are working and and then we're seeing individuals um spreading out and working in group spaces okay thanks meg so to take that um adrian's um space typology analysis further um we did a little bit of number crunching from the spaces and you know from the work that adrian and his colleagues did and so you know for me you know applying you know looking at things from a more quantitative viewpoint you know just to see what what else do we see here you know because we could observe but how could we articulate what we were seeing and so turning it into some numbers um again you know adrian and his group looked at the space from three different activity types individuals working individuals working in groups and then individual groups with individuals working separately and so um so we counted all of those um dots and you know these were the individual this was the group but in the blue and so what we saw overall just from a total count of all the different times that you know there were eight observations per floor so 30 for each um you know in january and there were multiple different times you know on wednesdays and saturdays and we drive those times from you know the high volume and the low volume periods of the libraries and wednesdays you know between one and two prior to covid um traffic might be up to 2,000 people walking in and out of the library in one hour and uh it's a it's a really busy place but in terms of occupancy them coming in sitting down and and doing something this is really what adrian's work got at so in terms of capacity usage um you know i looked at the low and the high percentages of that space that was available and so for each of the different floors and so the low capacity usage for individual seating as an individual activity was under 7% but the high was 178% so how does that work well that means that there were individuals actually working in group spaces and so we saw that consistently in the basement um where there's over 700 seats but approximately i would say about 75% of them would be designated or you know as intended for group work um but that's not how they're used so you know the nice thing is is that students feel that there's a lot of flexibility and so um you know that was never really an issue um in terms of capacity now the group capacity usage was you know for the space intended to be used by groups was as low as 1% and as high as 102% while how do we get that 102% obviously students move things and this 102% happened on the second floor which is the entry level for marston and there's the fewest number of seats on that floor i think it's 236 is what we had counted so you know on wednesday um in the afternoon that's definitely going to be a really busy time especially for that floor because it's the high traffic area so then um to look at those who are working in a group you know in a group but working individually that's where these high numbers are coming from where it seems like it's not possible to have 178% individual capacity but that's exactly what was happening is that these represented a lot of those people who they come in together you know the behavior mapping is students coming in as a group to study together but they're not really studying you know one focused topic they're just there together studying so we also looked at the highest total occupancy by floor so at this time these are um 736 is the total seating capacity on the basement first floor and then again two is the entry floor so it's 282 seats and so obviously the occupancy is the highest on a floor that has fewer seats and it's the most accessible in terms of that's where they have to go through that floor so um but then you can see the floor with the lowest total occupancy and we're going to kind of follow through on this you know we're seeing things already there's the anecdotal information that you know the librarians and the team brought to the study and then you have the space analysis which you know really started to confirm things you know students aren't just using the space as it was intended and they're you know appreciating some of the flexibility of the space that they find in you know the first and second level um have been renovated and um you know and so they have more flexibility to use those spaces as they would like um so then the question is you know and please feel free to you know I think there was a comment earlier by Kimberly you know about doing a space space typology analysis what don't you know about your space that a spatial analysis would help you better understand and so Kimberly can you share what you were looking to find out about your space through doing a space analysis sure I think that there were a few things but one would be how many people were sitting individually or in a group because for example on our ground floor we had a lot of long tables with chairs close together and then it seemed like we saw people you know sitting at a table and then five chairs would be unoccupied so places where we anticipated groups sitting they may not be and then also like what was the size of the groups so how much group seating did we need to have okay great so we all want to hear back from you after you do some of your observations is there anyone else who wants to share things that they think that this would benefit them and what that question might be that you'd answer with a study like this where this is Meg can you maybe everyone in the group does does know one another but what institution is Kimberly affiliated with I'm so sorry that I didn't say that I'm at Texas Tech University okay great yes and I have saying some of my colleagues on the culture thank you oh excellent well welcome to Texas Tech so feel free at any point though as we go through you know if you have ideas or questions that you'd like to answer from the space studies feel free to put them in the chat as well so so this you know this is just quantifying some of the things that we see but it's a way of looking at what's going on on the floor and so I think one of the strengths of this study is you know Meg showed you earlier was you know the different ways that we were collecting information and confirming information and kind of interrupting our own ideas of what the study should be and what students were doing in the space so as we mentioned you know we had to change up the survey and it turned from an intercept survey into an online survey and frankly you know I've done an online survey before and granted it was about overnight library hours which is you know just a raving topic for students on the UF campus they are very possessive of the library's time overnight but and they you know they have a strong opinion but you know so we we actually got 608 responses for the survey but we only analyzed 337 of them because they had to have visited the library and they had to finish the survey so those are the ones that we analyzed and so to help this survey be a little bit more you know to give them prompts where you know some of these people may have visited the library previously but in the fall of 2020 a lot of students were not coming to campus and so so we put in photos of each of the floors so they had to select the floor that they typically use and then they would skip to the next set of questions and the first one would ask them you know what um what characteristics of the floor you know um do you like and so or how did they make you feel and so we repeated if they said basement then we repeated this image in that question so that they were getting prompts about the space that they're talking about in lieu of being actually in the space and us you know interrupting what they came to do by asking some questions so this was one way that we adapted our survey so then you know to really get in deep to how we analyze the survey where Val says I'm getting in the weeds she's letting me get in the weeds today so um but I'm not going to you know go into a lot of detail about the results you know Prisen will have our report out but I'm going to talk about the different um ways that we looked at the survey data because as we developed the survey you know we had the adjective checklist and then we also had other questions that covered some basic descriptive behaviors of the students and then we had a lot of open text questions and as we were putting them together and Jason was creating questions that were open ended I was like oh these are going to be a bear to analyze and so Adrienne and I did analyze a lot of the comments but it really enriched what we learned about student feelings about the space so the survey we did the statistical analyses that we did you know we did basic descriptive statistics we did a means comparison we did a related sample sign test and then we used the reliability scale to see you know is this testing what we think it's testing and as we went through what I started to see in the data was that creativity you know based on the model that we were using creativity is the path to innovation and problem solving so what we were really looking at was what is it about the spaces if there is something that facilitates the creative process that leads to these outcomes of innovation and productivity so to make something that meets the you know the goal of this research library impact framework we did statistical analysis and then we did qualitative coding of a lot of the comments that we got using the space typology which I'll show you and the space use concepts and system wide diversity which I'll show you that and it actually comes through in a lot of the comments that we received and then we looked at the focus groups and also used our typology to to look at them and to gain additional perspectives and building really on the work that temple did that Nancy presented at the beginning of the of the studies was you know to make sure that we were gathering our employees viewpoints in the focus groups so we did have an employee focus group because employees have different perspectives and they're also valid because they're seeing things every day and they're seeing different uses every day and so this all seemed really important to collect and go through so for the descriptives you know we talked about some assumptions that we made and one of the assumptions was you know we're going to renovate the fifth floor and that's going to be the graduate student floor because graduate students need a space out to themselves because they're seriously studying and then you know so as we started to look at the data you know we saw the things that they were doing at this time and for this slide what we felt like we were seeing you know where the individual study was really really high what we felt is that you know this is definitely impacted by the COVID constraints that we had in place because you can see that you know use of team you know the space for team projects and group studies we felt like you know was actually pretty low you know and the infrequent use was higher and we did see we did ask you know students how much they were being constrained by COVID and that was actually a pretty high frequency so so then as we thought about this grad space we noticed that actually you know the graduate students were pretty heavily using the basement and so in this section you can see that actually you know the grad you know 35 percent of the grad students were using the basement level which we consider to be kind of a commons area if you go down there during you know some of these hours it is a really busy place I mean it is packed and so that was a surprising finding for us but it did kind of start to lead us back to where a study that had been done at the library maybe it's been five years now by one of our team members Sheila Bosch that you know identified this concept of alone together you know that students want to be doing their individual study but they don't want to be isolated and so we started to say okay we need to look at this more and then we also looked at the duration of their visits and the total hours per week that they were spending in the space and what stood out to me is you know as you see the undergraduates actually spending more time in the space and you know is that because you know they don't have their own offices they're you know as graduate students some of them have office space if they're working as research assistants but what we were a little bit surprised to see is how much undergraduate students reported spending in the space so once we got through some of the descriptive statistics we looked at our comparison of current versus ideal space this is the adjective checklist and so it's a paired differential where you have you know on the one side so it's a one to five Likert scale on the left are all the one so if it's more pleasant then I would go I would rate it something closer to one if it's more unpleasant and down I would rate it closer to five so in looking at this it's important to first of all recognize what's on the low end of the scale it's not the case that the higher the mean means that that's you know a more favorable outcome but so we could see that currently it you know for pleasant unpleasant the current score was higher because unpleasant is on the five side but an ideal score is lower and coming more on to the pleasant side and so I ran the comparison of the mean statistically and we could see that where there was big mean differences you know this was interesting to see that you know they want it to be more arousing that's a big difference and all of these were statistically significant with the exception of informal formal there's just a small difference between current and ideal okay and then overwhelmingly crowded uncrowded has a big difference and that finding appeared when we looked at these by floor that finding appeared on every single floor this was the largest difference between current and ideal space so that kind of shows you what kind of a busy place that Marston occupies you know it's right in the center of campus and it's right near a commons area outside that's very active all the time and so so we could see that these were significant but it didn't explain everything so because they could choose you know between current and ideal it may be that for one student you know their ideal might be that they want a space to be not too calm not too quiet maybe a little bit you know noisy and so we realized that we had to look at it differently and plus you know this was not a normal distribution so I had to use a non-parametric test to kind of really look at how we had set up the adjective checklist and to see more of the movement from the numbers rather than just the total mean and the mean difference so we looked at the current and ideal and looked at the difference between for instance on social on the current you know you have basically the same numbers a little bit higher under slight slightly social and you know but if you look at the ideal space there's a movement out of the end into the middle categories so that kind of speaks to the whole issue of choice and control and system-wide diversity they don't just need it one way and as you'll see that kind of also speaks to the iterative nature of the creative path and so so in seeing these you know this kind of spoke to us more where you know sleepy and arousing you know those are seem to be opposites everyone's in the middle but on this side they're actually moving much more to arousing and so by looking at this we could see that we still needed a better statistical analysis to kind of understand what does this movement mean so so first I looked at the difference on the mid-scores between the current and the ideal and what we could see except for exciting and gloomy which is an interesting one interesting pair most of the movement was into a higher percentage of two three and four so they were moving into the middle they don't just want it to be quiet they don't just want it to be noisy they want it somewhere in the middle some ambient noise is you know of comfort to people and so to see that these were moving you know more into the middle rather than into the extremes social unsocial what does that mean that means that there have to be spaces that can be flexible accommodate and that they need both and so so we kind of looked at you know what does that mean further so so after realizing that there were probably other tests out there I just want to point out here that for me you know I'm not a statistics genius I work my way through it and like most of you probably hear I think you know there are a few people in this room that are you know really strong at statistics but you know it's something I have to work at if you only do it once a year or once every two years you know you don't get as much practice you're not as good at things so I use other tools to help me through this and and so one of them is Laird Statistics and it's a website that you can go to and they walk you through you know from the beginning of cleaning your data and testing it for reliability and normality and so you know I would suggest that if you do get into some of these things it's a great site to use you can pay for a month it's like 1499 and in that month where you're doing you know statistical analysis it will walk you through you know how does your data have to be set up what kind of test can you run with that kind of data you know how do you interpret your results and then how do you report your results and so you know I'm not ashamed to say that I do rely on that because you know I want to do the best job I can but I don't want to spend a lot a lot of time you know being a statistical expert because that's not my interest so in looking at this test though we did the related sample sign test and what it does is it looks at the movement of the scores and so again you know everything on here is statistically significant in terms of the movement from current to ideal is statistically significant so again this isn't a random sample so there's that limitation as well but you know in looking at this we could see energetic and calm and informal formal which in the means comparison also was not statistically significant so what does this mean so what this showed us was again looking at the movement into negative what that means is that for students from current to ideal there was only a movement of 19 into the positive which was the unpleasant side you would expect mostly for that pair that most of the movement would be negative because pleasant was on the one end of the Likert scale the interesting thing is also the ties and so these are the people who answer the same from current to ideal and so where there are these non-significant ones you know there's not a lot of movement but where you can see for instance with social and social you know this again had a lot of movement but people moving in different directions so again we're thinking okay this means to us that it's not just one answer that the nuance here counts and this is one way for us to identify how that works and so for social and social 85 people moved to the positive which is the unsocial side 124 moved toward the unsocial and 128 stayed the same and so as we look at these you know the collaborative self-reliant some people moved toward being a more self-reliant space having that sense of privacy individual space but a lot of people moved into an area where they want spaces that are collaborative or have the potential for collaboration and again 144 stayed where they were so this was one way of looking at the data and kind of understanding what that movement we were seeing and the percentages meant and then this is just another graph of that and it kind of shows you you know how the differences are from the negative differences and the positive differences and you have to keep in mind where are my adjectives on this Likert scale because if if you go back you know sleepy is one exciting is one so you know you kind of have to remember where those numbers fall because we didn't just put what we perceived to be the preferred adjective on the right and the less preferred adjective on the left we mixed them up okay so finally to in pursuit of the scalable goal for this you know for the research library impact framework project I looked at this as a reliability scale and by removing you know some of the adjectives what we came up with this was the highest reliability in other words is this testing what we think it's testing and and so you know a point eight five two of a Cronbach alpha is actually a pretty good score that this scale is revealing to you what we think it's revealing to you and how would you use that you would want to see you know in your own study if you did a survey like this you would want to see where you're at in terms of this and and it needs to be tested we don't know you know there may be other places where this scale is much higher where this is for our ideal scores where are we with our current scores and what areas do we need to improve according to the statistics to make sure you know to improve the space in terms of its facilitation of creativity what we also found in the correlation is that there is a high correlation between the responses so the more that people wanted to be collaborative they also wanted to be social and so that was kind of you know makes sense finding so to bring all this back to how would you use this for yourselves you know in your space and then you know kind of getting out what Meg was talking about earlier is that you know this kind of mirrors and the creative process kind of mirrors Maslow's hierarchy of needs and so in looking at some of those that didn't make the creativity index these six adjectives down at the bottom they they're expected to be there they actually came out you know with the movement toward friendly from unfriendly toward relaxing from distressing toward pleasant from unpleasant that's the movement that we saw because those mirrored the cycle the physiological and the safety needs of students in that space and so so in looking at it really was kind of interesting how it fit where some of these are not so clear cut you know they do like a calm space but grad students didn't necessarily always want a calm space sometimes they needed the energy of students around them you know being in a public and private space didn't always work for the you know the point in process that they may be working in and so what I would say is that in you know there are a lot of other so this is based on yarn owls and Meg you can jump in here if you you know want to about where we source the adjective checklist from there were a lot more adjectives adjective pairs on that checklist and when we first looked at it I thought oh my gosh we can't have a survey that long they'll never do it and especially if it was an intercept survey so Jason Manili really worked on putting these together but in adding adjectives you know this is how I would think might be you know a way to kind of say well if these adjectives you know contribute to creativity and that process what process am I looking at and what other adjective pairs would I want to test and so you know in using this to kind of plug and play your own adjective pairs um based on whatever process you might want to look at so um the last thing we did with the survey is we coded all of the comments and Adrienne and I spent a lot of time coding comments and trying to see you know what were they talking about in the comments and this works into the space typology the public private individual and group um combinations and so system-wide diversity we you know we looked at and we talked about it in terms of establishment anti-establishment and mixed so those people who you know like a traditional library feel compared to some of the things they say they want in a library you know um you know lighting that changes as the day goes by or you know lots of technology there's kind of a tension there between wanting a traditional space and um and then wanting something more modern um and so you know so in terms of you know Kimberly you mentioned and um and Sarah this might be something to consider is to you know how we were coding things what were they talking about what was their preference you know what were the things that were important to them and then the space topics were to identify what were they talking about we broke it out by undergrads and grads and you know what were the things that they really focused on a lot and how important was it to them and so you know furnishings obviously you know there were a lot of comments about dated furniture or fixtures and those are things we knew you know so um but what does this mean in terms of comments and so for the system-wide diversity you know you have these comments um I like the older style you know over the modern sleek style of the library west which library west is our other humanities and social sciences branch and it's um it's across the plaza you know the common area in um on campus um I think this is interesting because their perspective you know is that and I don't remember which floor this came from but their perspective is that Marston is more traditional than library west and um it's just an interesting way to see what they're talking about but they mention this you know the older style um but then you have this is what they want so system-wide diversity gets at the fact that they really kind of want to see both things you know they talked about um you know some of these even had mentions to Harry Potter because that's where they've seen you know a grand old reading room um but then they want to have areas that have technology a modern look to it you know a feel of being you know more contemporary and so this is you know these are the types of comments and this is why we came up with the system-wide diversity um and it's a concept that Jason had mentioned during you know his talk about interior design concepts and so it's just one example of we were seeing that in our data um we anticipated it but you know they basically want to have their cake and eat it too so from the intercept survey these are just a few more of the um comments that we had and we had you know over a thousand comments that we went through and we coded and um you know it kind of gets at you know the first comment gets at the fact that you know students don't mind having noise in the space and in fact they kind of want some of that you know to be a part of the space and then they want to have safety they want to be able to see what's going on in the space and have a view so that um you know like it says they feel too exposed and then um the study spaces with you know privacy but visibility um and again that you know gets at the safety of their feeling in the space um okay so um so we were fortunate to have Syracuse and Stephanie um I'm going to ask you to chime in as you want um to scale the survey you know and to test the instrument with other um context Syracuse took the survey and they developed their own instrument and um so I identified basically the aspects you know when I do a survey I try and be very rigid about it but you know to identify the concepts that we're testing and the demographic details we're picking up and so in looking at the two different surveys um you know we focused on just you know some very um very very few items and you know in an attempt to increase our response rate to make sure that we only had you know so many concepts in here I think we you know we did well with that um and we approached the survey using the word feeling how do you how does the space make you feel um when you look at the Syracuse survey they um use the words adequate and you know is it adequate for these um for your ability to engage in this community and so their context was um you know their learning communities there's three different types of learning communities and we were just looking at what's the floor they most typically use so ours weren't um you know um tied to communities so they were really ambitious in what they were trying to get at you know awareness of the communities um the activities they were engaged in which we also looked at um frequency of use for certain tasks um preferred improvements um and then they looked at frequency of engagement with library workers frequency of use of the library resources and then the perceptions of the library staff and um we had some filters in there um they have one filter that I could see and then obviously you can filter and you know do what you want in terms of analysis and so their open text questions included descriptors you know what are you know descriptors of innovation creativity and problem solving how the learning community helps students with academics and how the library contributes to that success and so Stephanie please do chime in you know if you want to if I've badly bashed your survey or no no that's good yeah you're you're right we were very ambitious and so um and this is something we'll we'll talk about in our in our short talk that we give with all the others but we probably could have made our survey a little more narrow a little less comprehensive and that would have made the analysis a little easier on us but something that that came to mind when you're talking when we've talked before is that in our and looking at the comments especially um the results from our survey we found that you know we called it we didn't call it choice and controlled we found that students and the directors the community is really valued flexibility so that I felt like was a concept that we have both identified and it was it definitely came through in our survey as well so that's great that's interesting to hear and and I think that we both felt like our surveys were constrained by COVID um I think for Stephanie your your students weren't even on campus at the time and our students were able to come to campus but the libraries were definitely restricted quite a bit yeah and we we had fewer responses than we would have liked to so that also you know influences how you look at the survey results sure um response rate always the challenge okay so for anyone else what questions would you want to ask of your library space um you know we asked about their feelings about the space the frequency of use um the duration of their visits and how they felt about the COVID-19 constraints and you know we felt like we needed to put that in there because you know masking and the whole thing was really you know at times a reality we had to deal with as well and I'm sure everyone in here experienced that in their libraries you know um but is there anyone out there who could see what questions you would want to ask of your library users that might be different from the ones that Sarah Qs and you have asked so um Sarah you mentioned that you guys are looking at a pre and post renovation are you using the same concepts for both the three and the post probably um that's something that this summer I am we're going to do the the pre kind of assessment study uh fall spring some of the renovation if we get a grant is supposed to happen next summer and then probably then a kind of follow-up post assessment using the same concepts but um I think in addition to how are they using the space how do they feel I also want to do a study looking at space from a DEI perspective and look at sense of belonging as also another another way of looking at our spaces as well so yeah several big studies coming up in the next couple of years that's great um can you tell everyone where you're located oh Texas Tech okay yeah and um you know I can just suggest you know to look at the Duke study of their library spaces that and you probably that's the one that gave me the idea for the sense of belonging it was one when I gave my job talk here that I actually included in my job talk because my job talk was on spaces um so yeah no and I've my dissertation was on spaces so um I've looked at spaces in several different ways and just trying to think about it in different ways now to to grow my um grow my uh my research agenda so yeah next one okay what do you think may relate to that sense of belonging um I think a lot of the the things that you've talked about the um the top the topology that you that you mentioned the the private the um the safety I think is a big one um especially if we're looking uh like Duke did from a DEI perspective do they feel safe and secure um do they feel welcomed uh do they feel um you know looking at the things that we have in our spaces like security gates at our entrances is that a deterrent to students um from minority backgrounds um is that something that makes them feel uncomfortable but also security walkthroughs it's something that we're trying to ramp up is doing more walk staff doing more walkthroughs and um but how does that also affect students from marginalized backgrounds as well like just um one thing that um you know I found in some of my previous research was the sense of what Agati calls haven what I called um seclusion in my research that kind of like feeling kind of that your back is protected um in you know does um looking at traditional study carols and how does how do the how does that help with that sense of belonging and um and safety as well that do they feel that somebody's going to walk up behind them or do they want different types of seeding as well so just um yeah still trying to flush it out it's something that's very kind of a new idea for me in the last nine months but um still trying to flush that out but then also this this renovation which is just so massive because our furniture is you know primarily from the 1960s it's it's time for a refresh and just like like you all did at UF it is time for a refresh and so we um we have a grant that we're waiting to hear back on for uh renovating our ground floor um and then we need to renovate pretty much the other uh six floors in the building so um it just there's a lot that um I want to look at from different perspectives and look at space in different ways than what tech has looked at in the past and what's look at it differently than what's in the literature too. It's a big project that sounds like uh yeah it is and it's just it's one that um you know working with Kimberly and others here in the library that um you know it's not it's not just me it's going to be we're going to have to include others in in the project as well which is exciting like I'm glad to have to be at a place where we have those resources and the like encouragement to do this kind of work. That's good yeah that's good okay well I'm going to wrap up this section just by reiterating you know the path that we took where we started was you know basically the creative process and the creative ecology choice and control and then working through the space typology and you know in the first column is you know that path that students take as they go through the creative process you know it's iterative it's messy there's nothing really you know that says that some of this can't happen in different areas of or in different ways for different people but what we found is that this is the space typology that matched that point in time for students and then the creative ecology and the choice and control was really important in you know articulating what does this mean you know what it means is you know that they have access to resources authoritative sources individual and private space and facilitated group input for their preparation and so to kind of work through the process is kind of like you know if you're working through a research process we went through this as as a team also you know I could see the different areas you know the times where we were preparing where we were really just kind of mulling things and we kept sending things back and forth and when I thought we had an instrument and then we changed it again and you know those were we could see that in this process for ourselves so now we're going to move on to Val and we're going to talk about where this landed us and where we're at today yeah so this will be really brief because we you know I think our findings are our findings but I think if you can see what how we approached our data I think it can help you understand how we how we made it actionable right so I want to talk about the fourth floor specifically because the fourth floor really had the strongest differences in value between the current and the ideal of any of the floors of the floor's data um the responses indicated that the floor needed to be more arousing more exciting more social more collaborative more friendly um but less less crowded um but it also we had respondents who also said that it needed to be uh more gloomy 20 more like 20 of respondents wanted it to be more gloomy um that doesn't actually mean they wanted it to be more gloomy right they just wanted it less exciting um they didn't you know they didn't want to be distracted in their work um and so what we could do is we could look at how our floor was currently arranged and and then re-evaluate how we presented our furniture and our space um in a way that that supported their needs um I will also say that this you know this conversation about gloomy um versus exciting really had us we had a good conversation about whether we had the right adjective pairs right whether those two pairings were the right way to go about it and I think in the end it was um even though gloomy isn't ideal it's not you know it's not something that people choose as a uh as a uh a desirable trade I think it it did give us uh the ability to evaluate the floor in a way that was helpful um and so just really quickly you know what how that led to our conversations Laura already mentioned our grad-only space you know we had we came into this thinking yes we're going to do a grad-only space this is obviously is something our dean wanted it was something that um uh that we thought could be a good idea but we we shifted gears on that we decided no we were not going to do a grad-only space because students um didn't want to study as grad-only in in one space they really wanted to be more inclusive of their undergraduate of undergraduate students and then of course we had um we had an increase in biophilia a request to have uh increase in biophilia and this is plants but as um Meg would very clearly articulate if she were the one presenting this this is really an immersion into nature to get that physiological response right and and it can and it can include plants it can include artwork um it can it can be more inclusive than just or or it can include aquariums right but it um but it helps them feel more connected maybe to the natural world um we had private seating and booze and and I'll show you some images in the next slide on that um we wanted to provide students with more space we have got we we get so myopic on maintaining seat counts with our renovations um that we got away from really having personal space respected I think with our students and it re in this study reinforced for us that we need to prioritize that especially with quiet study where um personal space is very important to you um and then the rest of the you know computers improving sight lines all we've talked about these you know in other sessions uh and also allowing for you know space to spread out both for individuals but for groups and this is just the rendering of what our interior designers are putting together um for one of our floors and we like these little booze are things that we have community booze on some of our floors but these little individual booze we expect will be very well received um uh for for one of our renovations okay so we're going to um look really at what design you know brings to the table and what lessons can be learned and this work again trying to differentiate it between you working specifically with um of facilities planning um um you know arm of your institution um some of you have that role if you may have um interacted with those professionals but I know for example Texas Tech they have a accredited program and there are 184 CEDA accredited interior design programs primarily concentrated in North America and those accredited programs prepare students for entry level work and sitting for licensing exams and they can be located in three separate places um generally on campus three academic homes so at the University of Florida were affiliated with architecture our faculty in interiors also has a strong social science base we um and orientation but at Texas Tech for example interior design is located in the human ecology building again there's more of a social science space other accredited programs have more of an alliance or fall within the fine arts portion of of the campus and the fine arts focused programs and here in Florida we have a number of accredited programs but FSU Florida State University our counterpart in Tallahassee has more of a residential typically fine arts programs have a bit more of a high-end residential focus um to them however all accredited programs the students are expected um to be able to show mastery of research applied to um design um design problem solving and design thinking and similar to what we were talking about um you know just a few minutes ago in terms of diversity equity you know inclusion access is is really allowing when you when you look at and analyze the the interaction between the between people in space you see uniquenesses and unique needs as well as ways to bridge commonalities and connections that really help provide a north star for the design process I think um by having this collaboration with design as Val just pointed out it allowed us to really empirically show that um going with grad only designations for this particular context was not going to achieve um or optimize the outcome and again really help support what the end user experience is um further again we had talked about um almost a cycle of um pre-design research post occupancy assessment and potentially at different levels of renovation um that process can occur to really gauge what that end user experiences and and also to better support library staff staff to optimize what what they do within their workspace and this can create a a sense of place a stronger sense of belonging and really we know the resources at universities can be hard to come by you know we're in a um feast or famine often scenario but having these relationships between the design departments and um the library you know partners can allow you to make um really evidence-based decisions that will serve you well in over time and uh work with the students so we have in part an approach where you have ideas that are being generated and really driven by students so this design by students for students approach and of course um there is the the role of the licensed professional um that's involved in terms of the design programs faculty with on the design programs as well as the um affiliated design firms who will be implementing projects and we have our department has also worked with a number of architecture interiors and multidisciplinary design firms um the other piece which we haven't really talked about yet is again a picture is worth a thousand words and when we're getting people to to sort of visualize space and think about how it might be um transformed in a sense to better serve um in this case um creativity happening both for individuals and teams having drawings models showing actual physical materials samples um even three-dimensional modeling that can show how users would even move throughout this space and negotiate um move between different floors this shows a wealth of possibilities to non-design audiences it's extremely exciting you know you can have deans and other decision makers who might have an idea you know in their in their head and and but it opens up kind of entrenched ideas to new ways of um thinking about the library and also we have seen it as a powerful tool for soliciting private donations um when donors can see how a space could be transformed to be more welcoming for students when when the when that donor when she knows that students have really been brought to the table in this process it's pretty powerful next slide so um very quickly because we do want at least a little bit of time for questions this and Jason and I talked about this many times and so did Adrienne and and I and this process it's just none of us knew each other at the beginning um of the collaboration and over time we had we had about four other members who had great contributions and evolved but but then the core of us continued to march you know through the entire process but it was truly a joy I think because it was very much of a of just a great meeting of the minds and there was an openness to full collaboration and contribution on on both sides we really felt grounded in this holistic approach that um we weren't just looking at a particular floor but we had to really look about a floor or a space in the full library context the role that it plays and how it connects with the whole as well as there was a real buy-in for an ecological approach to creativity in terms of um embedded environments which impact one another so really um there was also a commitment that the research the value of the research had to go beyond I like it or I don't like it or a preference um for a certain color palette or um furniture offerings but really wanted to to get to get deeper um thinking about um going beyond what what is here currently to what could be and and there were multiple ideas on how we could transform the library and the shred examples that we showed you in our last workshop really showed that um we were able to question assumptions our research design also echoed this participatory process that did recognize the value of um different stakeholders um of students and staff and and that was important and that reflected the values of the team on the design team nothing is better than to work with a real client and the University of Florida campus like all of your campuses offers a living laboratory to do this work you know in um and the possibility that the work would be implemented and we could have um influence on that is just incredibly rewarding at every level um again when you recognize individuals and teams and then really I think we would really love to continue to work further in terms of the inclusion diversity equity and access space that's so important and you may have noticed um how the students compared to um some of our our colleagues and friends in architecture when you're seeing a lot of their models of spaces the entourage often does not include there's not as much emphasis on people in space we're looking at a larger scale um and that's not always true but I think within the um interiors we're really starting to imagine sort of people in space so I will pass um the floor Valerie is is your is passed to you thank you well so this is you know our project team we've we've been here and you've seen our faces um really and I want to say thank you to to that team because they have been fabulous to work with um Sarah Gonzalez and Jean Bossard from the libraries have also been participating um and and so and Sheila Bosch really I just want to take a moment and thank um ARL and Sue because this has been an incredible opportunity for us um to explore research and and a collaboration that we wouldn't we wouldn't have done otherwise and I think it has done wonders for um for our library spaces um to have this research behind our renovation and so the the ARL team has been fabulous to work with I have enjoyed hearing the projects coming out of the other universities um and so I think we'll just close out with that and hand it off to Sue. Thank you thank you Val and thank you for those very kind words I too have enjoyed working with with you and the rest of the University of Florida team and especially you and Laura who've been leading this and and all of the other teams so we are looking forward to a celebration in a few weeks with all of the other teams I just want to say thank you once again to you for this workshop series it's been absolutely amazing and I said last at the last session I wish I was back in a library so I could participate in something like this because it's just wonderful the work that you that you have done and I hint I hope you the University of Florida team will continue to share and um your research and the work that you're doing um I think would be beneficial to all of us as it already has been so thank you very much thank you to everyone for attending it's really great to to see you and and thank you for coming to all of the workshops and I I wish you a wonderful rest of your day thank you very much thanks Sue you're welcome thank you all thanks everyone