 This is one of my favorite topics, learning commons, and in particular, trying to make what is one of the great opportunities for academic libraries today even better. And to do that, I believe that we have to have some assessment in place in order to understand how to improve both our conceptualization of commons and our implementation of commons. So why assess? I'm going to take the big picture approach and start with the thought that learning or information commons provide one of the best opportunities to demonstrate the value of libraries in the 21st century. Almost anyone working in an academic library today, particularly perhaps library directors, can give you examples of being approached by higher level administrators, provosts, presidents, or individuals from the Board of Trustees asking, why do we really need a library today? In the age of Google and Google Books, in the age of ubiquitous wireless on campus, with students owning their own hardware, access to software in the cloud, why do we really need libraries today? And I think that in terms of traditional libraries where attendance and use has dropped, it's harder to demonstrate the value of libraries to learning programs. There are still reasons that traditional libraries are very valuable to the academic program, but learning or information commons provide great justification for the role of libraries in academic life today. Marrowing in specifically learning commons can reinforce institutional goals, particularly those related to learning. And it can be demonstrated through assessment of the value of the learning commons to particular academic programs or to the institutional mission as a whole. And I believe that the discipline, and I think it is an actual discipline, of stating assessment objectives, determining how you're actually going to measure some of the things that you want to accomplish. And those measurements can be done through qualitative or quantitative methods. And then reviewing and publicizing those assessments is a really important exercise for understanding the interrelationship between the physical space that you've created and the services and programs that you want to implement in that space. There isn't a lot out there in the literature about assessment of information commons. As this individual who I believe was a student in a graduate program said, there isn't a lot of published material about learning commons assessment out there. And I hope as a result of this talk it will encourage some of you to do more in the assessment area and to publish more about what you're doing. The areas that I think are most ripe for conceptualizing areas for assessment of the commons are first, it's the role of the information or learning commons in reinvigorating the library, second the role in enhancing learning, and third in promoting culture and community, the notion of the library as an iconic heart of the campus. There are other objectives or conceptualizations, the three I'll focus on are these. So first, one of the most common ways of assessing information or learning commons is in this notion of we have this new space that's very popular and we count its use and the use of the equipment and software and services. We do some satisfaction measures and even talk about how before the library was bypassed on the campus tour for incoming students and their parents and now people bring students in the tour groups come into the library to see the great space that is available. I think we can leverage some of these kinds of assessment in ways that will have more impact. For example, demonstrating trends so it's really important to start doing some of these counts before your renovation or expansion so you can demonstrate the increase in the difference in use of the library after the implementation of the commons model. I think it's also in campuses that are experiencing, for example, some bad press about the party life on campus or the drinking or other kinds of notions. How about working with your public relations department on campus to promote what you're offering in the library as a positive environment for students, sometimes 24 by 7 and portraying the library as this cultural and academic center and a point of campus pride. When student tour groups come in, it encourages both the students and their parents to look forward to joining your campus community. What about enhancing learning? Many commons are keeping track of the use of their group study rooms and the equipment and software that's available, the use of their multimedia studios, practice presentation rooms and their classrooms. I think we need to work more closely with some targeted initiatives on campus and this will depend on what's important on your own campus. These could be learning community programs, freshman year initiatives, honors programs where students are doing a senior project or thesis or undergraduate research programs. How do we partner with these initiatives to more closely intertwine the service program of the commons with these academic programs and then measure the impact of the facilities and the services on the learning that's taking place in these programs? Working with partners, many commons have partnerships for example with the writing center or IT but how do we demonstrate the actual value of these partnerships to the students who use the facilities? Demonstrating the value of the equipment and software for example for specific courses that are doing multimedia projects. What can they do as a result of the facilities software and services in the commons that was not possible before? And correlating what's available in the commons with broader measures, for example the NSEE work on student engagement or accreditation initiatives. I could probably spend an hour speaking on this topic alone but I'm going to move on to the third area, promoting learning community and culture. Here's one example that I think brings together a number of aspects. When I visited the Penn State library they were displaying science posters that students had created for a science competition in the library and so hosting these kinds of events where students had probably used the library databases and image collections maybe used the library's poster printing facilities and then the venue, the bringing together the community in the lobby and we also see a beautiful art display there. And even the cafes in the library are often said well gee students like to have food and drink in the library which is true but let's think about how the cafe leverages community. I've heard several institutions tell me that their cafe has become an informal meeting place for faculty and students. This is one of the measures in the NSEE survey that the more time students spend with faculty outside of class the more engaged they are in learning. So these are the kinds of connections that we can make and that we can assess and demonstrate as successes in commons. And promoting the cultural life of the institution through art and through events in the space. So we can work with student services or other programs on campus who may be doing campus wide assessments of student life and have questions included about the impact of the commons on student life. So finally I would like to encourage you to think very clearly about programmatically what you're trying to achieve in the information or learning commons and what mechanisms you have in place to support your goals and to think carefully about developing some quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge your success and to demonstrate that success to others. And now we're going to hear from two really different examples one from University of Colorado Boulder John Colshaw will be presenting and then followed by a new Vedantam of the University of Pennsylvania who will talk about the Weigel information commons. So over to you John. Thanks Joan and thanks for being here this morning. Just a quick profile so you'll know a little bit about CU Boulder. We're a campus of 30,000 students. We have 5,000 graduate students, approximately 6,000 students live in residence halls on campus and most of our students are traditional age. The need that we had in our library really started with the need to update our original main library building which was opened in 1940, there was an addition in the 60s, a major addition in the 70s and really no work since then. So the building was dated and there were many facilities issues that we had to take care of in the space. We also had a lot of demand by students for a 24-7 space and many of our campus administrators noted that the 24-7 facility for our campus was a Starbucks down the street and that wasn't really the sort of environment that the campus wanted to promote. They really wanted to have a place available on campus for students to work overnight. And that of course is because of changing learning styles and changing needs on the part of students. We needed to accommodate students who work at all hours of the night, we needed to accommodate students with group study rooms, we needed to accommodate students with more power than we've ever had before in our building. So all of this led to the Norland Renaissance plan and Norland is the name of our main building and it was a five phase plan to renovate the entire 350,000 square foot building and the commons is really phase one of that project and it's the only piece that's completed at this time. So the plan, you'll see a lot of things here that Joan's already talked about, we're enabling student work. We wanted to link our common space to learning and one element of that is the writing center is located in our commons. There's pervasive technology in our commons facility and this highlights one of the partnerships that we have in the commons. So from the beginning the commons was a partnership between the libraries and the campus information technology services. We were looking for a flexible and collaborative space. We wanted to address student needs holistically. This gets to the location of the cafe in our commons and the fact that we're open on a 24-5 basis we weren't able to quite pull off 24-7 and in Colorado it's very important to integrate the outdoors because the outdoors really is a big part of life in the West. So let's do a quick tour and then we'll talk about some of our assessment mechanisms. So there were three components to our commons project and the first thing that we had to do was to relocate our former reference room and dismantle our periodicals room and we also dismantled what was a pretty traditional reading room and this is on the second floor of our building and this became the new research services area so that we're no longer calling it the reference desk but the research services desk is on the second floor and this was moved to this facility so that we could find a space in the building that we would be able to cordon off for the 24-hour portion of the commons. The commons itself was the second phase of our project and this is the before shot and the commons was built in about 15,000 square feet in the room that used to be our reference room the main reference room and as you can see it's a pretty traditional 70s 80s kind of reference room with lots of stacks there was kind of an altar of a reference desk in the middle and we transformed it to something looking like this. There are team rooms around the perimeter and the center of the space there's laptop checkout available there's an IT help desk the campus has a service called Bugbusters and students and faculty can bring their hardware in and the IT staff will assist with problems. The writing center is located in this space and it's open on a 24-5 basis so it opens at noon on Sunday and stays open continuously until about 7 o'clock Friday night during the academic year. Flexibility was important for us there's a classroom in the space and the classroom is pictured sort of on the right hand side of this photo and it has a movable wall so that when it's in use as a classroom it can be sealed up but when it's not in use as a classroom we can open it up and take advantage of the 18 or so power outlets that are in the floor and believe me during finals time we need every square foot of this space so it's important to be able to open this up and be flexible. The chairs are on casters it's very much a laptop environment. We also use the common space for orientation and orientation is the registration process for incoming freshmen and they used a legacy computer lab that was replaced in this project and at first they thought how are we ever going to do orientation in this common space because they were used to doing it in a lab with fixed workstations where they could kind of channel people through well after one year of doing this in the commons they realized that all of a sudden our flexible spaces our team rooms the different sort of environments were exactly what they needed for orientation so this is a wonderful way for us to introduce students and their parents to the commons and to the library on one of their first days on campus. We were fortunate that the campus agreed to renovate a plaza area immediately adjacent to the commons at about the same time as we did the commons work. They put in lots of tables and chairs a very nice paver system so it's a much more contemporary look than the 1970s concrete that was out there it really highlights a sundial which is a gift that one of our special collections donors made to the library and really in Colorado folks are outside all the time we have 300 days of sunshine a year so having power in these tables outside is really an important piece of our commons. Similarly we wanted to really encourage the arts and incorporate beautifying the campus into our plan so scattered throughout our campus and much like your campus I'm sure are these power boxes there's a kind of a stainless one and then a green one that blends into the brick work a little bit and we were able to work with campus facilities and the library was the first place on campus to serve as a model for putting artwork on these power boxes. The windows that look on these boxes are in the commons so you were looking right out at this ugly power box that was tagged on a regular basis even in Boulder there's tagging but I think we were able to really turn this into a much more attractive setting and again it's a partnership that we have with facilities that's equally important to the commons. The final piece of our renovation was to take what was a traditional computer lab in the building and transform it into a graduate student suite and the faculty accused the libraries of creating a commons which would be an undergraduate circus at the expense of the research library. We heard a lot of things like this so we think by establishing a space for graduate students we're also able to really re-emphasize our connection to the research mission of the university. So the commons opened in September of last year, September 2009 so how do we measure our success and what are the various the measures that we've been using to determine whether or not we've been successful in what we've done in our commons. Well first this is our picture of success. This graph represents the overnight usage of the commons and on the left-hand side it shows it's 11 o'clock and you can see it's a very very busy place at 11 o'clock at night and as we go through even at 3, 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning the light blue squares on the top represent March so last month and on average there were 34 people in the commons at 3 a.m. during March 23 at 4 a.m. and even 15 hearty souls who had either spent the night or arrived very very early in the commons. So it's done exactly what we wanted to do in terms of providing a safe space. We contracted with the campus police department to provide security and this was another campus partnership that is so critical to the success. We initially thought we would outsource it to an Argus or some sort of private security firm but the campus police had nowhere to send students in the middle of the night. If they were locking up buildings they would find somebody in a room and they would say well you need to go home. Now they can say come to the library go to the commons there's a safe place for you to work. Computer usage has been staggeringly high. We have just 60 fixed workstations in the commons space but there are 120 laptops available for checkout and during January and February there were more than 5,000 unique logins to those machines and 2,700 unique logins on laptops. The use is just amazing. The equipment in the commons space is supported by campus IT. It's not supported by libraries IT. So they are the ones that gather all this data for us. Folks are staying an average of 48 minutes on desktops and 72 minutes on laptops. I'm not quite sure what that means but over time we'll be continuing to monitor this usage to see how folks are using the space and what that means for for the future of the commons and how we tweak things down the road. This chart it's sort of interesting the blue the light blue line shows the number of items checked out at our traditional circulation desk. So presumably this is book and print reserve types of circulation and the purple line shows the number of checkouts of laptops in the commons and what's happened is they're almost checking out more laptops than they are checking out books which is a pretty amazing change in business. Student feedback is important to us. We've tried to gather student feedback throughout development of the commons. We started with things like rolling whiteboards that we moved around and then we transcribed notes. Now we're taking paper comments through suggestion boxes like this or from our commons website and you know we've we've got the good comments. We have the things that we always expect to hear like please keep the rest of the library open all night long and I'm not quite sure where they think we're going to put a jacuzzi in the hot tub but I'm I'm sort of not surprised. Another really interesting piece of assessment that's happened in our commons is a student space utilization survey and our reference department has worked really closely with the program for writing and rhetoric which is our writing across the curriculum initiative on campus and this is also the group that hosts the writing center that resides in the commons and one of our reference librarians commissioned a study with a group of students in a technical writing class and they did a space utilization study of the commons in the first semester of operation which has really been intriguing to us and this has turned out to be a 35 to 40 page report. They use lots of research methodologies that that many of us use from observation to surveying to comparing to other places and they've learned things like there are dual boot Mac hardware in the commons and the students have commented that that dual boot environment really doesn't work they'd much rather have a mixed hardware environment so that was important for us to know. We have these collaboration stations that are pictured here and the idea was that there would be a large monitor and you could easily plug different laptops in and then use team spot software to collaborate on projects and the students said well nobody knows how to do this and what happens is people just sit there with laptops why don't you put more fixed computers in this space. I think these are incredibly valid observations and it's exactly the sort of feedback we need from our users to continue developing the commons in the future. Our cafe of course is a critical element and I think that caffeine must be one measure of success as well and we partnered with a local coffee shop and they were very interested in keeping late night hours and they bought into the concept of the commons which was something we could never get our campus housing and dining services to buy into. They didn't want to stay open until three or four or five in the morning but our outside vendor does and our outside vendor is even interested in having a revenue sharing agreement with us. So in the first year we earn five percent of net and we have a sliding scale so that by year five we'll earn 15 percent of net and I can tell you that in our first quarter of regular operation our check was for $3,400 and that money is going to be really critical to keeping the commons fresh to either cleaning or replacing furniture and doing new things along the way because in many ways the commons is an unfunded mandate. So for the future we will be revisiting the Norland Renaissance plan to determine what needs to happen next in our building. Of course we never have enough power, we never have enough desktop computers and we're trying to enhance other spaces including our branch facilities but ultimately our commons even in the short time it's been open is an absolute success for us. We know the usage is high, it's reinvigorated the library as the center of campus which was one of the things we wanted to do all along. The research services desk has seen a large increase in the number of questions that are answered in that space. We've created a safe space that really contributes to campus life and we're really pleased. That I'm going to turn it over to Anu. Thank you to John and Joan and thank you to you for coming to hear a little bit about the Weigel Information Commons. I'm honored to share with you my experiences at the Weigel Information Commons at Penn Libraries. At the back of the lecture hall there are two handouts. Please take one if you haven't gotten a chance on your way out. One of them is called Ivy Leaves and it's a new newsletter and you will see in there interviews with some of the faculty and the students who have made our commons what it is today. So John has just described a brand new commons in Boulder. Ours is a thoroughly used facility. Campus-wide planning for our commons began in 2001. We opened in April 2006 and so I'm going to be talking to you about the past four years of activities at our Information Commons. Here is my plan for the presentation. I'm going to ask seven questions and I'm going to quickly describe our answers for each one. The first three questions I'm going to talk about set the context for our assessment. What do we do? What do we believe and who cares about us? This sets the parameters for why we need to measure which is the fourth question I'm going to ask. Then I'm going to speak along the lines of what Joan has already mentioned. Quantitative measures, what do we count and qualitative measures, what do we sense? More interesting than the numbers often are the stories, the ones we hear and also the ones we tell. I'm going to conclude with the most important question. What can we improve? The logical end of good assessment is data-driven, strategic and creative decision making. Conscious choices that build on what can be counted and on what can be sensed. I've put a big number seven on the slide so you can follow along with me and count down until I'm all done. Here is my first question. What do we do? So I could spend hours on this describing all the things that we do and I'm sure each of you could do the same about your organization. In the CNI booklet is our standard brochure and as I mentioned at the back of the hall is a recent newsletter. I've also brought with me copies of some of the comic books that our students have created so if you're interested just come up afterwards and I can show you what they look like. There's four pictures on the screen of our space. We actually don't have a lot of space. It's about 6,000 square feet on the first floor of the main library at 34th and Walnut Street in Philadelphia. We have just 10 rooms and 12 data diner booths. We have one classroom and one media lab. But the place is very, very full of technology. We have computers, laptops, video cameras, scanners, a poster printer and we have our brand new iPad, which just arrived last week. And the place is very loud, very crowded. It's hopping. Just to give you a sense of scale. In fall 2009, we averaged each month about 11,200 students using our space. Just to put that in context, Penn only has 10,000 undergraduates. So clearly, some students are coming to see us every day. We also provide a lot of student assistance services and an awful lot of workshops. Last fall, we had about 1,900 students attend our workshops, just to give you a sense of the scale at which we're operating, excuse me. Students make videos. About 300 students a semester make videos, comic books, posters and podcasts here for lots of different courses and also for personal expression. What do we believe? I'm just going to spend a few minutes talking about our philosophy. The minute you buy a new computer, it has depreciated. In three years, you'll have to pay somebody to take it away from your place. So why treat it like a rare book? So we run our commons with this philosophy better broken than dusty. We encourage our students to move our chairs around. We encourage them to take our video cameras all over the city. They borrow laptops from us and they use our hardware without hesitation. Even our brand new iPad has already been touched by about 100 hands and it's been with us three days. So physical comfort is the second big part of our philosophy. We believe strongly that people need to be comfortable in order to be creative. So our space is noisy, it's cozy and it's food friendly. Students feel comfortable and welcome here. They own the place. We just fix things for them when they break. And conversations and partnerships matter. We look for suggestions continuously from students and faculty. Most of the new purchases we make are as a result of students and faculty saying, why don't you have this yet? And we do a lot of contests. We find that contests are a good way to engage people, to start talking about things they may not talk about that often. The quote that's on the screen is from Ben Franklin and it's really appropriate to what we do. This is a poster designed by a freshman and at one first prize in our poster contest, which we just held this February, called the Got Visual Contest and the idea was to promote visual literacy on campus. Question three. I mentioned the first three questions set the context. Who cares about us? Well, definitely the undergrads care about us. Every time we have a printer problem, every time a tutor is late, it's the undergrads who come and tell us how we need to do what we do better. Our program partners also care about us and I want to speak very briefly about them. The Writing Center sends tutors every day. Students meet with the tutors to improve their writing. We have the Public Speaking Center on campus, which stands, it's called Quick Communication Within the Curriculum. They send undergraduate tutors who help their peers to become better at public speaking. And our third program partner is the Winegarden Learning Resources Center. They send staff to our Commons to help students with study strategies and time management, which are two really important skills for success at Penn. The program partners work with the library staff to put together an integrated workshop series called From Assignments to References. And the idea is that when you come to the Commons you can get help on everything from when the assignment is first given to you to when you're winding it up with your bibliography. Faculty care about us also, but mostly when their classes are involved with us. And I'll talk a little bit more about examples of how we work with faculty in a few minutes. Other departments in the library care about us in terms of outreach. And last but not least are the university administrators and donors. They are looking for our assessment information to justify the investment they've made in us and also to continue to give us gifts to help us keep going. I'm not going to talk a lot about why measure. I think we all know why we need to measure. I'll just say that keeping track of what we do has helped us to make the case for new programs and services. For example, this semester we've just started a new service where we give 15 minute appointments one on one to students to help them get better at visual literacy. And these are students, there's about 60 of them who are enrolled in a money and banking class. It isn't something we would have expected to start as a new service four years after operation. But paying attention to what we can count and what we can sense helps us to anticipate what the needs are for faculty and students and to step in. Last year we launched a new equipment lending program that's been a huge hit at our commons. So now I'm going to talk about the two types of assessment. The first one is what can we count? And the second one is what can we sense? I'll first talk about what we can count. We can count a lot of different things. The computers we own show about 1500 logins each month. Students bring tons of their personal laptops, mobile devices, and we can also count how many times they access our wireless network. We can keep track of which of our software programs they like. And having this many people use our space has really taught us a lot about working with large numbers of people. I'll just tell one funny story. Having 11,200 people using our space every month actually helps the commons stay very, very clean. It's because it's really hard to leave your trash in a booth when the next group of students is there waiting to use it. So it's very interesting how high foot traffic has actually ended up making our commons much easier to manage than was first expected when we opened. In four years of operation with 60 computers in public use, we've lost exactly one keyboard to spilled soda. And I think that's very reasonable given the amount of use that we are keeping up with. We of course keep track of workshop topics. And I'll talk in a little bit about how we improve what we do. I'll just show one graph. This is one of, this is basically student group usage. The number of students over the last two falls. The light blue line is really hard to see. But you can see every fall we're having more students come to use our space. As well as spring and summer, there's a sharp increase in fall, which explains why we got to that number of 11,200 from last fall. We keep these type of graphs for each of the countable indicators and we use them to make our decisions. I'll spend just a few minutes on the trends we see from the numerical data. We see pretty steady growth in the group usage. We see pretty steady growth in workshop number, attendance and variety. We also see a heavy increase in mobile devices. So we're starting to pay a lot more attention to making some of our services available in a wireless platform. We see a decline or a plateau in the use of our media lab. As student personal laptops get more and more powerful, there's less need for them to come and use the conversion rack in our lab. So it starts as thinking about things we can lend, as opposed to things you can use only when you come to the commons. And the one aspect of what we count that has been completely unpredictable has been our late night use. We see a change from semester to semester and it's actually quite hard to predict. I'm going to talk now about some of the qualitative measures. I feel like some of the more powerful forms of assessment are not the ones that are easily countable. They have to do with simply living in the space and paying attention to what's happening around us. What do students do when they are here in the commons? Skype calls to relatives and classmates are really popular right now. Each of our data diner boots has a laptop with a webcam and we find international students in there regularly talking to their families. We have French students in our diner boots who are using the webcams to record themselves speaking in French for French class. We have three video recording rooms that were initially designed for public speaking practice, but they are actually being used in completely different ways. We have several hundred students each semester who come into the video recording rooms, they dress up in costumes they make, and they put on plays in the language they're learning. They turn in the DVDs to their professor and their professor grades them on their ability to speak French, Spanish, Italian and American Sign Language. Faculty report that watching these videos helps them assess language proficiency and interestingly that it also reduces the potential for academic integrity issues which they were facing in written language assignments. So it's a completely new use of the space. It happens to be a very good fit for the way our technology works. Our Media Lab is the place where more ambitious technology happens. I'm going to pull up the list of classes so you can get a sense of what happens here. What we do every time a professor brings their class in in an organized way to the commons is we list them on our website. So these are the folks who are here this spring. As you scroll down you can see there's a variety of disciplines, a variety of subjects, and different types of classes. We have a law school class, we have several freshman writing seminars. There's many different ways in which classes are using the commons in an integral way as part of an assignment. Technology is the great equalizer. I'll just say one comment about this. When Microsoft puts out office 2007, the professor who's published 20 books is in exactly the same place as the freshman who is finding her way on campus. And we find having workshops that don't differentiate by who is attending has been a great way to get people to talk to each other that don't normally get to talk to each other on campus. This next slide is a wordal text analysis of our success stories page. When we started I asked professors who had had a good experience in the commons to give me a little bit of information about how they use the commons and this has grown over time. Every month we pick one or two examples of a particular professor or a particular student and how they use technology that relates to the commons. Over time we've accumulated a lot of examples and this presents it in a in a visual format. Roughly what's interesting is that faculty now ask us to feature their work on our success stories page. So it's come to mean something different than it did when it started. It started as a way for us not to forget what we had done. Recently I was invited to attend the board of overseers meeting for our largest school, the School of Arts and Sciences. I had a really nice surprise when the professor who was making a presentation about technology in teaching and learning gave the board a guided tour of our success stories page. It gave me a sense that people have ownership now over the commons in a very important way. They find ideas here that they can use in their work. Looking at the wordle I was happy to see students are featured so prominently in what we do. I'll talk a little bit about our work with video projects. After having substantial success with our annual mash-up contest and our video projects in different disciplines we began a process of capturing faculty conversations. We brought together five faculty at Penn and put a video camera up and just asked them informally to talk about how they use video projects in their disciplines. I'm going to play a one minute trailer of this conversation. The two professors you will see in the clip are Peter D'Cherny from Cinema Studies and English and Cinema Studies and Andrew Lamas who is a professor of urban studies. It will give you a flavor of what people are doing with video projects in our commons. This page has about two hours of video. I'm going to play just the one minute version. But gaping students do video assignments as part of a critical studies course teaches them a lot about how to view films and how to analyze them. I think we're all pretty good at actually analyzing writing because we all write and we've learned how to write and we're taught the techniques of writing very early. But we are more passive film consumers, immediate consumers. And I think having been able to use a camera, think about framing a shot, thinking about editing, thinking about sound, all these things help us to become much more critical viewers. Right, and also more critical citizens in a society where so much of our politics takes place in the media, we have to learn how to not only be conscious about how consent is manufactured, but also about how we can use media to get our voice out in the political process. And I think making films helps to give us the literacy to do that. So this project has actually grown now into a large multimedia production with wonderful student interviews. If you look on our website, you will see five patchy term modules of each of the professors that you just saw at that desk. In talking with the students from all five disciplines, what we've been struck by is how much they care about these videos that they create. One student created a video for his freshman writing seminar. He posted the video on YouTube and he asked all his Facebook friends to watch it and comment on it. And his professor Jackie Sadashige made the comment, how rare that would be if she had given him a traditional paper writing assignment. Students don't share their academic work on paper with the comfort level that they do when they share their academic work on video. And I'll talk in a little bit about some of the examples that are on our site. So what have we learned from our qualitative measures? We have a sense of certain things that are here to stay and certain things that are on the decline. We see a few trends. First thing we see is that faculty, some faculty anyway, love to change things around every semester. We see different tools used every term or the same tool used in different ways. The hot topic this spring on our campus is Google Maps with embedded YouTube clips to make these geo-portraits of different cities. Last semester there was a lot of interest in NPR style podcasting. So staying on top of new technology and being willing to create new workshop topics becomes really important. We also see that faculty care more now about what we do than they did three years ago. This past September we held the Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium that included six faculty sharing their favorite technology tools followed by hands-on exploration sessions. We were quite shocked when the lecture hall we reserved overflowed with 85 faculty attending. Faculty then came back and had lunch in the data diner booths and they wrote us notes afterwards saying how happy they were that they got to meet people from other schools and other disciplines. There's something about technology being the great equalizer that is bringing people together in the commons. Our students' showcase concept is also here to stay. Our YouTube channel now has 80 videos, most of which have been created by Penn students. The racism in Disney video which was created by three freshmen has now been viewed 800,000 times. My favorite is the Weigel music video, of course. It's a real cheerful video. We need to improve how we archive student work as it happens, because it gets lost so quickly. And we need to find a systematic way to find good examples by discipline. The one thing we've learned through the conversations we have with faculty is if we can come up with a closely relevant example, it's much easier for a faculty member to try out a new technology. They're just much more willing to take that risk. So what is on the out? Well, we definitely have heard loud and clear that long workshops are on the out. We're now getting ready to make half-hour workshops, which is a big change from when I first started at the Commons. We were at the three-hour workshop stage. So the last point I'm going to talk about is the last question. What can we improve? And what can you do with assessment data? One lesson we have learned is that we have to be able to change what we do very quickly and without looking back. Holding on to workshops that were popular last semester does not help us. The technology workshops we offer today are quite different from what we did last semester. Every month comes new topics. Accepting honest feedback is not always easy, but we have to do it to stay competitive. There are lots of places on campus now where students can access computers. To keep them coming back to the Weigel Information Commons means we have to fix what's not working very quickly, and we can't sit back even for a little bit. We have a faculty advisory group that really challenges us and we have our program partners group that really keeps us grounded. Having regular meetings with these two groups has really been important to us in terms of governance. Thank you for taking time to listen to my story. I look forward to hearing yours and we would love to have you come and visit us. My contact information is on the screen. Thank you. Thanks very much. And I appreciate you both for leaving us plenty of time for questions. So we've seen, talked about some overarching concepts about assessment. We've had two really interesting and quite different examples of assessment of commons. And throw the floor open to either questions for any of us or if you'd like to share what you're doing on your campus, we would be very interested in hearing about that as well. So over to you. Thank you for your excellent presentations. Very informative. I'm wondering in terms of designing your commons, were they designed by librarians or by architects or by designers, particularly the Norland Renaissance? But actually, both of them. I'd be very curious what the process was to come up with the various ideas. The Norland Renaissance Plan was something that we worked on with a professional space planner who is by trade and architect. So that's kind of the first piece of this. And the Renaissance Plan is very much a conceptual sort of design document. It's a guiding document that takes us to the future and shows us where we're headed. It's not really specific as this chair goes here, but it's more like this is the part of the larger building that really would be best suited for commons or this is the part of the building that's better suited for stacks. Then when we got to the real, the very much design work of the commons itself, then we worked with an architect. We did visit other places. So we were influenced greatly on that visit. We went to Duke, to North Carolina State, to Emory and to Georgia Tech. And we pulled a lot of different concepts in from those places. When we went on that trip, we brought the architects along. We had librarians there. We had IT folks with us. And all of that really helped inform the specific design. And we tried to have focus groups with students along the way too to make sure that there was student feedback even before construction. Hi, at GRS was a very similar process. There was a planning group that involved faculty, staff and students. And several of the library staff were on the staff committee. And the three committees met over several years. And they went to look at the University of Chicago, which is where we got our idea for the data diner booths. Our architect for our commons is Ann Beha from Boston. And some of the materials in the commons were custom designed. I think the general idea was to have a variety of spaces. And that's been a very good decision. So every nook looks different. Some of the rooms have natural light. Some of the rooms don't have natural light. It's not a one size fits all look. So each booth has a slightly different look to it. And we find that students get their favorite spots and they come every time to their part of the commons. And the other guiding principle was the focus on undergraduates. So the colors in the commons, the surfaces are designed with undergraduates in mind. And all of the space in the commons is public space. That was a hard decision to make, but I think it was an important one. And it builds a sense of ownership for the students. I wondered what kind of expertise you staff the commons with now. Actually, we were just talking before the session because I'm feeling very understaffed at the moment. And I wanted to find out what everyone else's staffing situation was. We actually rely a lot on students to run our commons. Right now at the Weigel Information Commons, we have two full time staff, two half time staff, and three library school interns. And many of the workshops, for example, are taught by the library school interns, which causes some concern when they graduate. We have to kind of start all over. The way that we set up the process is all of our staff spend a lot of time learning the new software. Because we are considered to be the high tech place on campus, we can't really afford to not know the latest version of Office or the latest version of Adobe. And so there is this continuous sense of trying to catch up. And having students on our payroll actually helps us with that. Because the students are eager to try the new things out and they usually teach us some little tricks along the way. We too primarily use students in our space. We're still learning. And I think over time, the types of students that we use in the space will really change. As you saw from the one slide, there's a lot of circulation activities. So many of the students are spending their time checking out laptops. But the IT services are also staffed by students. I believe there's an IT full time staff member that's actually there overnight because the campus IT runs a telephone hotline. They call it Five Help. And that runs 24 hours a day and that's actually staffed from the commons overnight. So they brought that person from another kind of locked up office on campus. And it's part of our public presence. And then our overnight security are not students. It's, they're called community safety officers that the police have contracted with to provide our security. So those are the types of people we have. And John mentioned that their reference statistics have greatly increased and just to clarify, since I visited the facility, the commons is on a separate floor from the main reference area in their case. Our dream was to have an escalator between the two floors but that didn't quite happen with funding someday. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the laptop checkout routines. We've scaled way back on that service. When we did some analysis, we realized that it was a very, very small number of people who were using this very, very busy service. And so we've rolled it back. It was very labor intensive and we were getting ready to refresh the pool and decided not to do that. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you manage that service and do you see that as something you wanna continue? Well, I would say that the management of the laptop checkout service is frantic to say the least because they are checked out so often throughout the course of the day that they can barely recharge before they go out to someone else. We've found that students, even though our campus statistics show that student computer ownership is about 97% and about 65 to 70% of that 90% are laptops. The faculty still aren't integrating the use of a keyboard into their pedagogy. So students aren't schlepping a laptop along with their books to class but they wanna come to the commons and work for maybe an hour in between classes and the number of checkouts is just amazing. The problem that we've seen with the laptop checkout is since they're going out so much, now we also have to check out cords. And in our pre, we've checked out laptops for many years but the checkout period was normally two to three hours and the turnover wasn't very high so it would go out and then it would come back in and it would get recharged and eventually it would go to someone. Well, now it comes back in, it's not recharged, it works for 20 minutes and they come and they need a cord. So as soon as they need a cord for the laptop they checked out, then they wanna check out a cord for their own laptop which means it just kind of snowballs into lots of different things that we need to provide. So that's one problem. The other problem that we've encountered is warranty concerns and we've found out that Apple, these are all MacBooks, Apple is less than pleased about honoring the warranty of these pieces of hardware when they are dinged and nicked and beat up and used as heavily as they are. So I'm not quite sure what direction we're gonna go with that laptop checkout but they're overused, I would say. I guess one way we've handled that is we provide a lot of laptops in the commons so people can just sit at the diner booth and use our laptops and those are locked down. We have a very heavy laptop lending program from the bottom floor of our library which is open 24 hours. Students can check out laptops and cords for three hours at a time. I think there's 60 laptops that are in circulation and most of them are out every day. We don't have the problem you've mentioned because we have a variety of students that are borrowing them. I did wanna mention the other equipment lending program. We lend cameras, microphones, all kinds of gadgets. There's about 20 different types of technologies. We lend projectors for people to put presentations on on the road. The latest thing we have are these small micro projectors that can project from a cell phone. So if you really need to do a presentation on your iPhone, you could. Those we lend for three days at a time and there's no charge for borrowing them but a very stiff $25 a day penalty if you bring them back late. And that's been a good decision because it's an easy way for people to try something new out and often they may end up buying it if they like it once they borrowed it from us. Hi, Roger Schoenfeld from Ithaca SNR. Thanks, these were terrific presentations. I really appreciated this program. I was curious if anyone could say anything more about the, I don't know, I guess the demographics of the users that you're coming across. I'm particularly interested in which fields of study are benefiting most from the commons as you've organized them and or maybe individual services in the commons. I mean, are you seeing science students come in as much as humanities students? Are you seeing, I guess also seniors coming in as much as freshmen? If you could sort of profile the user community in any way or even offer some hypotheses. I think that's something that we are getting a handle on. If you go to our website and go to that list of courses that will give you a very good sense discipline-wise. One thing that's been interesting to us is the word of mouth effect. So we had one professor in urban studies who did a poster design assignment with his class. The next semester, a big chunk of the urban studies faculty did it and now it's becoming, we see a heavy involvement with urban studies. So many of the disciplinary movements are very much word of mouth. And there's some examples in that newsletter that's in the back also. We did analysis by class here and we found that seniors are heavier users of the commons than freshmen. But over time, the percentage of freshmen using our commons is going up. And a big reason for that are the admissions tours because every freshman comes to the commons three times even when they're not at Penn yet. They come as a prospective student and so they come to Penn knowing where we are, knowing what we look like. So I think over time we will see that increase. In terms of graduate students, we mostly get graduate students from education. We do not see as many graduate students from the sciences or engineering who are using our space. And overall, the relationship between discipline is there's definitely less use of the commons by science and engineering. This is an area that we're really studying actively and something that we expect to learn much more about. And the student survey that I mentioned, one of the things they did ask was what college are you enrolled in? And the sample size granted was a little small. It was only about 200. But in this survey there were 64% of the people were from arts and sciences, 29% from the College of Engineering. And we have a branch engineering library. And what this has sort of driven us to do is to work with the College of Engineering to see if we shouldn't be putting a commons-like facility in the engineering branch facility as well. So that's something that we're doing right now. We did pilot a commons-like facility in our business library up front, before the Norland facility. So the business students were only 6% represented here. Because they have their own space. Because they already have their own space. But I think arts and sciences really is a big contingent, the social sciences and humanities. Some of that is geography, in terms of where the library is positioned on the campus. But it's something we're very interested in and need to learn more about over time. One of my favorite questions in the OCLC studying, study of students that was done a few years ago, and then they did a separate report on the data from college students, was what suits your lifestyle, regular physical library, the library on the web, and Google with predictable results. And I would be so interested in seeing that survey done in libraries that have learning commons versus those that don't. Because I think that these commons suit the way students want to do academic work today. And so my understanding, and Anu can correct me, is that at Penn, the Wharton School, the business school had renovated and developed a commons-like environment that was being mobbed by students' undergrads from arts and sciences. And that was a big impetus to the College of Arts and Sciences coming up with some money to do some renovation for the main library. So I think that it can cross disciplines as long as it addresses the way students and faculty want to work in their disciplines today. One of the findings from our faculty survey was suggested that humanities faculty are a higher share of humanities faculty value, the library's sort of teaching support role than science faculty do. But that's sort of at one remove from trying to understand students, several removes from trying to understand students. I just want to add, as Joan mentioned, one of the reasons why the Weigel Information Commons was created was the perception on campus that school of arts and sciences students needed more places to work in groups. But as a result of creating the commons in the main library, what we see is that students will also study with their friends in groups. And often in one diner booth, you'll have one engineering student, one school of arts and science student, and one business school student. It's because friendships that are formed on campus are often based on the living groups, which are not really related by schools. So having it in a central location and having it be all our welcome, I think is a big part of why the commons has the popularity that it does. Thanks. Hi, I'd like to ask, John, if you could just comment on the space that's specifically set aside for graduate use and what you're seeing there in contrast to the undergraduate spaces. That's another space that was also designed to be flexible and something that we know we need to enhance over time. We sort of base that space on very traditional graduate student carols and the state of our legacy graduate student carols are so abysmal that it would be embarrassing to show them. They're in a top floor of the building with 1940s light fixtures, tile floor, no carpet. It's really embarrassing. So we modeled it after those because it was kind of the last piece that we had designed and the commons was meant to be the showcase of this particular project. But next week, actually, is Graduate Student Appreciation Week on campus and we're gonna survey our graduate students to see how we can improve the space from what it is today. Right now, we've checked out each of those carols to two students and they're teaming up to share one of the work surfaces. There are lockable cabinets and each student is assigned a lockable cabinet. There's power inside the lockable cabinet so that if they need to go, if they're a TA and they need to go teach a class, they can charge their phone because we never have enough juice for our iPhones or they can leave a laptop and we've noticed that it's not used as heavily as we thought it would be but we have a very long line of people waiting to get in. So hopefully this survey that we're gonna conduct next week will tell us if they need some soft furniture. What if we were to add some lockers and rather than assigning a carol, just sort of have them as open carols in a quiet space. We've also talked about what if it wasn't just a graduate student suite, what if it was a graduate and faculty suite because the space that we offer for faculty isn't much better. So right now the services are very limited to this locking cabinet and a surface to work on but it's something that we are eagerly trying to update and improve because graduate students are so important to the future of our campus. Well, I think that wraps up our time. Appreciate all of your interest in this topic and in these projects. I thank my colleagues, John and Anu for their excellent presentations. We've got about 10 minutes before lunch so you can check out or stay and come up and ask us additional questions or discuss topics with us and thank you again for attending this session.