 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, webcasts, online show. Call us what you will. We are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week, so you can always go to our website and watch any of our archive recordings later. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where all those archives are on our site. We include the recording of the show, which is posted to our YouTube channel. If there are any presentations as we have here this morning, we post that up on our slide share accounts. You can have access to those if you want. And any important websites, maybe mentioned, you can collect those together and post them available to you as well. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, Booker reviews, interviews, any training sessions, demos of services and products. Basically, our only criteria is that it is something a library related, something libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing, new services or products they might be interested in. Some of our topics might seem a little out of the box when you look at the titles, or potentially, but trust me, everything comes around to Libraries The End. That's my only criteria that it's something library related. And all types of libraries. Library Commission, we are the state library agency for public academics, special institutional museum libraries, anything across any type of library. So you'll see all sorts of things on the show. Both our live show and our recordings that are available are available free and available to anybody out there, free and open to anyone. So if you do know anybody that might be interested in any of our shows, friends, family, neighbors, send us them to our website, have them send up for our upcoming shows, or watch our recordings later. We have Encompass Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, things that we're doing here at Encompass Library Commission, but we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning. Today we are talking about UNL, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For those of you in Nebraska, go big red. For UNL, see probably a period. But from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries here in Nebraska, we have Michael Stratton. Deb Pearson. Good morning. And Regina Flowers. And they two years ago started making changes to their university library, which a lot of libraries have done around the country. And this last year at the state conference, you guys did this presentation. That's where I saw our Nebraska Library Association School Library annual conference. And I thought it was a really great, what they did with switching things around. So I'm excited to come on the show today to talk about it. So I'll just hand over you guys to take it away and tell us what you all did. Okay. Thanks, Krista. First of all, thank you to the Encompass Library Commission for inviting us. We don't usually get to go on the road. So we got to come all at five blocks out. Take what you can get. Everybody has to start somewhere. So today our presentation is called from collections to commons, how you can out turn the staff into student spaces. I was affiliated with this project because my name again is Deb Pearson. And I'm the head of library facilities planning. So I had a lot of fun helping plan this space. So I'll turn it over to my colleague, Michael. And he's going to talk about a little bit about how we managed to start the turning staff into student spaces. Okay. Here's a picture of our finished project. We'll lead with what we ended up with. The Del Corio Hall. That's a donor's name in the Learning Commons. Our presentation this morning is on a transition from primarily staff-centered space to user-centered space. Like most academic libraries, we have very, very large collection. We're housing in the middle of campus and we decided that we had an opportunity to fundamentally change the space. And that's the focus of today's presentation. So a little bit about who I am. I'm the circulation and collections manager for the UNL libraries. I'm responsible for the physical condition, layout and movement of the circulating print collections. A little bit about me, I've been in collections and stacks maintenance and management since about 1998. And between Dem and I, we have a little over five moves in excess of 500,000 items and more smaller ones. And I think either of us want to counter admit to. So we've been doing this for a while. And the processes that led up to this project are something that we've been practicing for a long time and implementing in smaller ways throughout our systems at the University of Nebraska. I wanted to start off with this particular quote that I found from Joe Harvenbrook. You can see the citation down in the corner. And as for most academic libraries, our mission is not to collect the whole of human knowledge. We have limited space, we have limited resources. We are not a warehouse for books. A warehouse is a storage facility. We are using not for sitting on a shelf for years on end. Now I noticed from the registration list, and those of you logging in, we have a lot of academic librarians on here again. Those of you in those areas will know that this is a change that's been slow in coming to academic libraries, some slower than others. And that's that we have been warehouses for years. We have materials that we collected in the heyday, and we all have the same 27,000 journals sitting on our shelves for years and years on end. And oftentimes we've been taking up prime real estate in the middle of campus just to warehouse these items. As we focus on a transition to digital collections on to delivery of collections directly for our users and those sorts of things, the idea that those spaces in the middle of our campuses being warehouses is one that's become largely outdated and outmoded. That was the genesis for this entire project. We had a beautiful space, and we were lucky enough, and then we'll talk a little bit more about the visioning process, but we were lucky enough to have some architects and some planners that were able to see that, capture that, and convince some of our administration of that. The problem being is that that space was already being used for said warehouse and was full and had been collecting books and desks and tables and sort of patron of it. Stuff for years and years on end. So we were tasked with emptying it out. So the administration approaches us and looks at saying, we just need to empty one floor out of the library. All we have to do is empty this one floor. This should be pretty straightforward, right? We even have a high density storage facility. We'll just move it, right? How hard can this be? You have a limited budget, limited time, as all things that happen in the libraries, but let's get this done. Here in this picture, you can see an example of what our entire floor looked like. Roads and roads and roads of books. Matter of fact, for many years, we've been taking out more and more seating just to make room for more shelving to bring those items in. The problem with this is that one floor was 32,000 square feet and had over 450,000 items on that floor. Now for those of you in Nebraska, that's almost two books for every person in Lincoln. So... We're checking it out. We're checking it out. We needed to figure out what we were going to do with those. And that far exceeded the space we had available immediately in our storage facilities. Another problem we had is that our collections focus for that particular floor was on the social sciences and humanities. So this was the most widely used print collection and the one that we needed to retain in the building, even though that was the floor that the visionaries had identified was the one you needed to move. Our time printing was under three months and we were not to buy any new shelving for any spaces or encumber any funds for the holding of these materials. Well, this is the point where we begin going through and doing our scenarios. Tim and I had a great many of these. I think we wore out a white board or two trying to figure out what we were going to do with these. We thought about what if we started eliminating print copies of materials in G-Store. We identified stable electronic sources and that way these print serial runs could be moved down the road. Many of you know that the print serial runs take up a tremendous amount of space. And so our idea is, well, if we eliminate those then maybe we won't have 450,000 we need to move. So what if we take the science print materials off site instead of the humanities and social sciences. Our particular complex that we were talking about doing this in is comprised of two buildings, Love South and Love North. One Love South consists of eight floors, many of them sub floors, and it was built in the 1940s. And the Love North which was built in the 1970s which you saw pictures of is a much more open space. So we were thinking if we pull out some of the science materials maybe we could move the humanities and social sciences into that Love South building and then we can keep the materials that the faculty need to have in print and accessible nearby and available. Another thought we had is what if we moved our government documents off site. Our government documents at the time took up three floors, those eight within Love South, and we were looking at a way to try and bring those together with some of our branch documents, collections, and we were really sort of out of space for those. So our thought was if we moved those off site we would have more room again for those humanities and social sciences materials. What if we made a separate area for visual arts in the lake. These two buildings, Love South and Love North are connected by a walkway, not horribly large but very attractive, and so we were trying to think of a way of a collection that we could bring into that area to sort of play off of the strengths in that. So it came down to in order to make it work that we did all of the above. So what this ended up being is a move that comprised 83,000 lineal feet of materials. By the time we got done touching everything that was 1.4 million items. So we moved them through six locations. We moved 15 distinct collections. We ended up moving shelving in advance of the collections as we were emptying them. And here is one of those things we wore a white gown on. This is a sequence of how we moved the materials. Now you'll see on the side those hexagons are the various areas and shelving locations where things go. The middle column is the proposed sequence of moves. Now each of those moves has two components. The red arrows are where we're going to move the shelving to and the green arrows are where we move the items to. So you'll be able to see as we go along through here where everything ended up going. And this was the diagram that Ben and I used to try and keep everything straight, but where it was at any given time. And it actually worked. Didn't lose anything. Yeah, I wouldn't go that far. What you will see on the video is we do have a question mark. They were even up to the very end. Where's that last piece going? So we're going to start off talking a little bit about the kind of moves that we did in order to make this space available. Now in our link, what we used to have and what we still have in a very reduced footprint is our reference collection. Now those of you playing home game though, the reference collections are very, very limited in their use anymore. The days of ready references pretty much been replaced by online web sources. So the amount of space we needed dedicated to a print reference collection was deemed unnecessary. So we pulled all of this out. You can see a picture on the left of what it kind of looked like before. And on the right we go back to putting up the showing. So we need to take 23,000 items as what we could fit in the link. Unfortunately our visual arts collection was almost double that space. So it required us to split the collection part of it to go into a local storage and part of it to move upstairs. We'll talk a little bit more about this, but one of the things I wanted to comment on why we chose the visual arts collection, you'll notice throughout that picture on the left hand side we have an abundance of natural light flowing into the building. This is one of the few spaces in our building where we actually have really nice natural light. One of the things that the visual arts faculty had requested for years was a space in which we could look at the art books in the light in which the art was intended to be done. So that was our biggest focus for bringing us up here. In order to choose which of the 23 were brought up top in which of the 25 are from the bottom, we primarily looked at circulation. We gathered faculty input from the area and we began to sort of transition into what we're now calling curated collections. Previous to this move, all of our collections were based on L.C. call number. If you managed to be privy to that particular system, you understood where things were and if you weren't, you were just sort of out of luck. So what we're trying to do is create a curated collection that's more on subject that we advertise as such. And we'll see that a little bit more in Regina's presentation as we expand this idea. For the science collections, the idea was we would take 350,000 items from our Love South building and move it into high density storage. Now, you might remember, I said it didn't all fit in the high density storage, so some of it went into another facility which we'll talk about in a little bit. Our high density facility is a high vape storage system, temperature and humidity control. You can see the picture here is looking down at someone at the end of one of our hallways. This particular building was built about 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It was on campus. It is on East Campus, on our agricultural campus. And it holds approximately 950,000 items. So we've been moving stuff into there for a long time and as you can see from this particular picture, there's not a lot of open space. The interesting thing about these particular facilities is items are sheltered by signs rather than call number orders. So each item has a specific item location code and we dispense with call number ordered in order to fit more books in a smaller space. Doesn't matter, it's not to be browsed by anybody. Nope, not unless you're on a forklift or trying to be in the area. Now, our other section was the government documents. The university was lucky enough that as the National Guard here in Lincoln was moving facilities, so one of their buildings adjacent to campus became open. So we were able to take possession of this Department of Defense building here that you can see. And we began erecting shelves and then to turn it in. We were lucky enough that the state was able to provide proper insulation and won't have you throughout the building. But it fundamentally still is possible. So we put in our US government documents, Nebraska documents, UN documents, and OAS documents. So in looking at what we have, Love North First Floor, the picture we saw before with the rose and rose stacks. This is what it looks like when we begin taking materials off of the shelves. Love North had 456,000 inches of materials. Love South had 483,000 inches of space after we get them removing all of the science materials, the government documents materials, and the other random collections that were over there. At 12,153 shelves, those of you quick on your calculators know that that is 2.3 inches per shelf in spare space. Not very much at all and certainly not room for error. So it was a quite tight move as we went in. Here's another image you can see of what the floor looked like when we were beginning to take collections off of it. The entire floor is completely packed full. From this vantage point you can see approximately a third of the almost half made volumes that were on this level. So what did we learn out of this? Planning, planning and more planning. And as you go through things, you need to be prepared when your first plan doesn't work. Inevitably it won't. Many instances where we thought something with fitness space didn't and adjustments had to be made. The notion behind this is to be flexible in any of your move planning. Those of you that use space planning you know that as it comes along you're going to run into difficulties and you need to be selling to the administrators, to the fundraisers, a vision that has room for change. It's not going to look like what you think it's going to look like as you come off the back. So make sure and be flexible. Don't be afraid to find help. This is probably the biggest thing you need to learn in doing these processes. Use people that have experience in this area. One of the reasons why we wanted to do this webinar is to talk about that. Put ourselves out there, make sure you find other sources, get different ways of doing things. Find professional movers, specifically library movers. We all know that library movers are specialized breed and we certainly don't want to just sort of leave it to the U-Haul, two men on the truck, U-Haul, a couple of guys for manpower. You need to find people that specialize in this. They will make your lives easier and do that. The other thing to think about is what is left over. When you finish this project from a collections point of view you'll be left with a space but there's going to be leftover shelving. There's going to be dirtied forwards. There's going to be all sorts of stuff. It's not just about the books. And that is where my colleague gets to shine on her own. You left me with a dirty space. You're right. Whoops. Okay. After Michael got everything moved off, this is what he left me with. 28,000 square feet of bill. It is huge. Before the presentation started my colleagues and I were trying to figure out just what this was back in the day. So we figured it out. A little bit about how we came to have this space. Michael alluded to it in his opening remarks. We had the university hired Sasaki an architecture firm from Boston to review the campus master plan. And they were just wandering around the campus on a break and happened to wander into the library. And you can see from the upper left-hand picture here and a little bit to the right but mostly straight ahead to the left. This whole floor is primarily almost floor-to-ceiling windows. Looking out on things like some beautiful sculptures in our campus-wide sculpture garden. We had some great landscaping. Our landscaping people had just done a fabulous job with the campus over the years. Some of the buildings on campus are quite impressive. Unless you were lucky enough to get a carol around the perimeter of the floor, you didn't see any of those things. So they quickly ascertained that this could be a big hub for the campus and we're very excited to come back to the campus planning people and drag them over to the love north which many of them admitted they hadn't admitted in years to show them what a jewel we have in the center of the campus and with quote-unquote very little effort it could really be turned into something special. So we fast-tracked to the top of a very long construction list. Some of you in academic and probably public too know that when you want to get on to that construction list you start at the bottom work your way up over a number of years fall back a couple of times when higher priority projects come into play and so on and so forth and so in a matter of literally months we went from not being on the list at all to being the one with the bullet if you will. So thus the three months of planning that we had. But anyway that brings us to here we have 28,000 square feet of asbestos mastic to pull up first so that was kind of a pre-project project so every one of these tiles had to be manually chipped off so the mastic could be replaced or be removed I'm sorry and the other fun part of this project in the abatement world is we were the first project in the state that came under a new government rule about PCBs which were a carcinogen used in grout back in the 70's when this was building was constructed so we had to factor in cost and time to have a grout scraped put into a little test tube thing set off to somewhere in Pennsylvania and then sent back with the results that the area was either clear of PCBs or the PCBs couldn't be removed so they had to be encapsulated this had to happen with every window and you will see that there are many of them there because one part of the project was to remove the fin tube at the bottom there and replace it with floor to ceiling windows put a new HVAC system in the above the ceiling basically replace the whole HVAC system in the basement which was another fun project and turn this into learning comments but it was brought in on budget and on time by working with great construction people university project managers everybody just really pulled together and did a great job this is a picture of the area in process we went with an interesting kind of ceiling process instead of just replacing the ceiling with laid in ceiling tiles we did kind of an industrial vibe painted the entire ceiling black and used some ceiling tiles but we also used some floating islands you can see kind of in the center of the picture there their individual strips of wood that they put into what they call islands that held lighting fixtures and so on and so forth it's a very unique look to the area we replaced custodial closets, telecommunications closets the elevators were completely refurbished with new elevator closets we put lots of card access devices and that's the new thing we built a new vestibule on to the north side which you saw in our opening slide we as far as landscaping goes to the left of the picture the landscaping was basically a bunch of berms with trees on them and we decided to replace that with a beautiful new plaza which you saw on the slide at the beginning of the presentation so it really did extend outside the building and really encompassed a major portion of the heart of the campus as Michael indicated and we have a Dunkin Donuts the two things that the students of the University of Nebraska Lincoln said they wanted in a study space were for it to be open 24-7 and for it to have a coffee shop so thanks to a very adventurous and risk-taking franchise holder for Dunkin Donuts they said well sure that sounds like a great idea to have a coffee shop in a library of course who wouldn't do that so they did and as you can see it has been just an outstanding success to the point the last summer we actually agreed to giving over half of our vending area so that their preparation room could be expanded so they could offer a wider variety of pastries and we can't do sandwiches and suits and we can't even see very pleased that they can have any kind of coffee drink they want for Apochino's to their hearts content and lots and lots of Carl and Blaine's donuts which would be their favorite so we were just thrilled that we could give the students the two things that they wanted new kind of statistics to display well and Regina will rock that don't have donuts shouldn't be serving at the door don't have we mentioned before we have about 28,000 square feet of space we have controlled about 75% of that the southeast corner of the commons was given over to a new digital learning center aka a computer testing center we consolidated all the testing centers on campus into this it's got about 184 seats the largest testing center in the Big 10 we stuck a few extra seats in just to make sure that was the case and the students love it it's all self-contained the students make reservations for themselves online the instructors love it because now they don't have to give over however many testing tests they want to give during the semester they can have every teaching every class meeting is a teaching time and not a time set aside to take a test the students like the flexibility of being able to take tests when they want it's comfortable as you can see if you look straight through it's got a great view again and students need to kind of refocus for a minute so we're happy to have them there it's been a great success and it brings more students into the space if they had no other reason to come at that they have a great reason to come into the space it's not even 24-7 it's actually opened a lot longer than the combined ones were before and they do have a lot of weekend hours which the students really enjoy these are just an example of the spaces we decided to informally divide the space into three areas one is a programming space and Regina will talk a little bit more about that where the furniture is more mobile so that we can clear it out for different kinds of presentations there is more the collaborative space where we have a small 18-seat computer lab we have about nine Macs and nine PCs lots and lots of collaborative tables around then the third space which is sort of indicated there on the left is a quiet more traditional study space that's what the students also asked for was really almost throwback you can't see from this picture but in another picture you'll see that it's almost a throwback to the old reading rooms of the last century where lots of wooden tables and lights and comfortable chairs where the students can really just spread their materials out and do some quiet study here's an example of that more traditional study space in the upper right-hand corner the lower right-hand corner has a two-sided electric fireplace in the space which has just been I don't know what would have happened if we wouldn't have been able to have that because it really has become a gathering place for students year-round and especially when we have the heat component of the electric fireplace on but it has really become a great gathering place for the students then on the left-hand side is an example of that programming of the whole furniture area that Regina will talk again about and you can also get a better sense of those sailing islands that I was talking about Regina, I'm going to turn it over to you. Sure I think this quote gives you an idea of what we were doing and what was behind this project again finding value and new things what will add value and be appreciated by our users Before I go into detail about my section I will turn it over to Michael to talk a little bit about our service point. Okay, one of my roles now that we've been able to place out and turn it into something different is coordinating the service desk component in this space and throughout the libraries. What you'll see here is what we call a shared service space it's continually changing continually evolving as partnerships both within and without the libraries that have joined us. You'll see here that it's divided into a section what we call Husker Tech that's the campus information technology folks we've been lucky enough that they partner and they put in a full service access point within the commons this helps greatly with the large number of questions on how do I access the wifi how do I register my device I have trouble printing things like that Husker Tech is able to share those with us. On the other side over there you'll see a shared service point where we have both individuals trained in reference services more traditional library reference point questions as well as what would be traditionally general circulation sort of questions the check in check out of materials everyone has a shared understanding about basic directional questions basic reference, basic circulation but we try to have specialists at those desks at all times so that we can share across departments. Part of the creation of this whole space led to the creation of a coordinated service point group that integrates all of our partners and all of our services and that was one of the things that really came out of the commons that's really serviced well in all of our spaces is how do we better work with our partners over our services seamlessly at any location but within the commons very kind oh boy I hit something funny it's okay just go down to the lower right off of this and just click that there we go and it gives you the orange arrow at the top and it will move that out of the way and you can slide it over there you go very good so I am Regina Flowers and I am the manager of the Dell Hall Learning Commons I kind of had to hit the ground running I started the last business day before the commons opened so I missed all the fun of the construction and Regina remind us when it opened sure it opened in January of 2016 great as this project started one of the questions we got a lot was what makes the learning commons different from the Nebraska Union on the left here you can see one of our open study spaces in the commons and then on the right two pictures in the Nebraska Union of course there are similarities there are both public buildings with spaces for students or users to connect and collaborate but the Nebraska Union really is the social hub on campus and we see Love Library and the Dell Hall Learning Commons as the academic hub we mentioned some of the ways that we kind of highlight that academic focus Deb talked about areas for quiet and collaborative study we chose a variety of furniture that would be conducive to student study habits Michael mentioned the shared service point with research circulation and technology help we also have ample technology in our spaces a strong wireless connection to accommodate students working on project or presentations and then we do offer a variety of academic focus programs as well so not only do we try to strive to promote that academic focus but since we've been open our users have solidified our reputation as the academic hub on campus here you can see students using our space and it's quite full and they're using it to study so on the left we have an image of our miserable study rooms and then on the right again is those long tables that Deb was talking about in our quiet reading room parking back to a more traditional space for a go too far I want to kind of give you a lay of the land of the Learning Commons down here in the bottom right corner you can see that digital Learning Center has talked about about 25% of our space and then those three quadrants that we were mentioning we've got the quiet reading room up here on the top left corner is a collaborative space that's where our computer lab is this programming space back here behind Dunkin Donuts that has mobile furniture it's used for student study space when we are not doing larger events our shared service point is right in the middle of the space across from the service point is where we do drop-in programming and concentrations and then all along this corridor you can see our miserable study rooms we have 11 small study rooms that will seat up to four students and then we've got four large study rooms in the space that will hold up to 10 throughout our space we also have some small curated collections that Michael had mentioned and alluded to there's a variety of collections on the right you can see our popular fiction we also have popular science we have some career books we have a research and writing reference collection we also have two featured titles collections and those are rotating they rotate every semester they're based on themes as well okay current my position is to maintain our usage numbers we are an active space so we're constantly collecting data looking at that data seeing how we need to tweak our services or what we offer in our space so here's kind of a look at that first year and a half we've been open you can tell we are highly used we've had more than a million people through the gates since opening our service point is to utilize for a variety of services and questions we've answered more than questions, research questions we've had more than 16,000 circulation transactions and more than 6500 technology equipment checkouts through HUSPER Tech our study grounds are highly utilized students can reserve rooms for up to two hours a day and we've had more than 45,000 study room reservations one of my favorite statistics of course is the Duncan Donuts numbers and we sold more than 122,000 donuts since open so do you have information on how this compares to before statistics? I've had some things you didn't have of course like the Duncan Donuts sure, sure, we can compare people through the door those kind of numbers we have to keep in mind though that we have additional services in there as well so when we look at the number of people through the door we also have the digital learning centers the people testing or all the people coming into use Duncan Donuts or on campus studies pushes up those numbers as well the learning commons is an active space it is a user centered space in addition to sweeping track of these usage numbers we are always kind of asking for feedback from students and so we'll post whiteboard questions and see what they like what changes can be made in the space as well another thing we do to keep the space active and engaging is programming the pictures here are some of the drop-in consultation programs we do on the left you can see career services and other departments on campus once a week they come in and offer drop-in help for resume writing and job searching on the right you can see one of our library programs it's Demos and Donuts it's a quick 15-minute demo on library services so here we've got Joyce Melvin our interlibrary loan manager and she's talking about delivery with students and again that's that space across from the service points so it's right in the heart of the learning commons it's a lot of traffic through there we also host a variety of larger events on the left is Big Red Rock Yes this is a welcoming event for new students that we do in the fall we work with our building partners the academic services on campus help new students kind of get ready for their first semester on campus here we've got two students and they are competing they're trying to look up resources in our catalog and see who can find materials the fastest in the top corner is an image from Dotset New and it's a bi-weekly concert series we do in the fall and spring we work with the school of music and the music library to formate faculty and students performance opportunities and then the bottom image is from our Psypop talks now this is in that program space that mobile furniture comes in handy so we can really change the space to suit the needs that we have but Psypop talks looks at the intersection of science and pop culture alright so circle back we want to kind of show you again this evolution in a quick two years from stacks to student space today we really talked about the how how we renovated the first floor of Love North to turn it into learning comments but what I'd like to do is in this presentation on the why and why this project is important not only to the library but to the larger university and that answer can be found in the responses we've seen from our users we've heard them say things like the learning comments is my second home I'm getting better grades and I'd like to end with this quote that we got on one of our whiteboard questions or prompts for response where the students saying I love having more space to study and work with others with such a large student body having lots of study space helps students study habits and improves outcomes greatly and that will open it up to questions yes anybody have any questions type them into your questions section in your go to web interface I can see them here I grabbed them also I did mention earlier if you have your own microphone you can ask your question that way just type in I have a microphone please unmute me and I will do that in the next video so nothing came in while you were talking but that's okay the study space that you're mentioning that going retro or whatever but traditional I think that's really very telling so many people are saying no we don't need all this it's all online it's all technology it just has a device and that's not the reality the students just like when we were in college need a place to spread out with all my stuff and my papers and my books that I still am using yes and I'm glad that you got that information from them saying what they wanted and not just assuming you know what would be something that would be let's see we do have Alice in here says she tore the space last year it's amazing thank you okay is there anything you added that doesn't get used or that you were surprised by so is there anything that was there's always things could be changed don't be afraid to fail but is there anything that was not as expected well we have seen a few things in terms of usage that we've been changing in service it's less than physical but more of the services one of those is 24-7 that had a very strong you know we really want this space to be open we want it to be open well whoever said that didn't show up we were looking at statistics on an average overnight use you might have three or four people so honestly in our current budget environment that's difficult to sustain and we are looking now we've reduced for the summer hours to try and experiment a little bit with what does not having a 24-7 space look like just because we waited a year to see how it was completely used to figure out how to use it and it's been a year of full use so we've been a year and a half of being open so we wanted to have a full academic year to be able to examine it so we're looking at least over the summer hours of how those hours function reduce with the combined service points we've also had some changes in the nature of questions being asked with the various service points so is it the best use of a reference librarian's time to be stationed at that space or do we need to have a better reference training for our student workers that work in that space or to care professionals that work in that space to be able to answer the same level of questions without necessarily using a reference librarian in those areas so I think most of our changes have been service-based rather than facilities and layout-based one facility change we've made was adding some additional door openers to some of our study rooms the space is ADA compliant but whatever we can do to make the room more welcoming and accommodating so we did that for us as well let's see here we go how many of these space ideas came from your staff versus external architects or designers? I was wondering about that too when you were talking about the ceiling and how we chose the wooden island type lighting and whatnot that's a great question the basic design came from the architects there was a planning group made up of library faculty and staff that helped the architects understand that we certainly wanted a lovely architectural space but it needed to perform well as a library primarily as a learning process so we wanted it pretty but we did want it usable as well so we had some conversations about things that they wanted to use for surfaces on floors and things like that it was primarily what the architects envisioned I would say is 90% of what we got looking back knowing the success of the dumping donuts thing it would have been nice if that could have been larger but there's the trade off of how many seeds do you take up for more donuts so we took a gamble on that and we're pretty successful I think in most many libraries who have done coffee shops I can't there are usually very successful as long as you know what you're doing we're done and we're lucky that it basically is it's a library partner but we are not responsible for talking or anything and Gina has a very good working relationship with the manager and we have a positive working relationship with the franchise holders so we get together a couple times a year we just recently reviewed the summer or the fall hours for the shop over our semester break so we have a very cordial and positive working relationship with everybody from that area what I'll also add is we have the advantage that the Nebraska union have gone through a renovation shortly before we started our project and so I know that our group got the opportunity to kind of go in there and sort of be used to that space and kind of take some things back with us, one the union, they serve a larger audience they should have larger seeding areas and larger booths but I know one thing that we noticed was one person set a booth net for eight and you lose those seven days so those kind of factors played into some of the furniture choices that we've made and I know we've run in samples too and did sit tests and got feedback from students on the type of furniture and one of the things that we learned that's reflected I think in the quiet reading room in particular is that students wanted serious furniture for the serious work that they are doing on campus and weren't as drawn to really bright flashy colors or intricate designs they're not thinking about that it's not important because they'll be there for several hours at a time so they want things that are comfortable and they want furniture that if they're meeting with one group they need kind of a study room situation and another group might need more collaborative furniture that they can pull together to make a bigger group so they want to be able to do all that in the same space and go get it from a company where we're at and I really think that the user input comes at the very beginning in the broadest notions of what they're looking for in space which is, you know, so we certainly started with that, with the requested ones requested 24-7, they're requested traditional as well as more technology then we take over in the middle and try and make some of those decisions and some of the structural bills on those ideas and then we come back to the user on some of the small details like, okay, this is the space we're building, you like this chair, this chair you know, so we really kind of do a sandwich way of using the users we certainly didn't have time as fast track as this process was to be able to have user input on the entire project so I think that's why we kind of chose the sandwich method in order to pull it off and we had been redoing several areas in the older building left south over the past few years experimenting with color experimenting with different types of furniture we used one of our big reading rooms on the second floor we converted from our media services area to a student seating area that had met with a great deal of success so we were able to pull some of the designs that we used in that area, modify them a little bit and move them over in so we sort of had a lab over in left south for a number of years that's something that I was wondering about is that during this time of when well everything was internal we were moving the books into space and construction about how what any kind of effect it had on the students trying to use the library but I would think having them involved in the decision making would help with some of the issues about why can't I get what I need to or where am I supposed to go now it did certainly cause us to focus on a more robust delivery system we modified the facility in some ways to be able to access other areas it used to be you could only get to the basement through that floor when that floor was under construction we had to come up with ways to access those collections so we did try and keep those users in mind and in the expanded a lot of services and spaces outside of this specific floor during that time to try and be sure that we were able to close things down we also tried to keep everybody apprised at the progress on our website we posted pictures as often as we could and kind of made construction updates at staff meetings and tried to help everybody be in the loop so if they were off campus at high B and somebody said so let's go on over at the library everybody would be able to give you know that elevator talk that we all know about to kind of keep the citizens of the state and kind of going to because they could have been anywhere and if their daughter or son was home from school and said oh geez there's really a lot going on at the library and they run into a colleague somewhere they would be able to say so what is going on at the library and that person would be able to give a little more information about what's going on I also think that's one of the importance of moving collections very very quickly I mean we joke if they only gave us three months but we certainly wouldn't want much longer yeah people know where their materials are so being able to move them very very quickly as opposed to drawing that process out maybe as long as we would like to would have actually had an adverse impact sure yeah there's two other questions here during the twenty-first time when it's open to get staff on throughout all night long how does that work we did but we had we had twenty-four seven hours during final signs and we did not have librarians or staff on hand we had security just to keep the building available for them we don't have permanent staff we have student workers and one of our community partners in the space is UNLPD our police department so we had a community service officer security along with those but we do have two students trained in both basic reference and in access on site at all times so in addition to the CSO that would stay overnight in the building when it was open twenty-four seven one of the things that we had worked with UNLPD with over the years and they had come to us a couple or three times and said you know we're really interested in having a satellite office in the center more than the center of campus and every time we hear of a building being renovated we visit with them about that possibility and they say oh you know I think we could build you something down in the east corner of the basement and they say well no we really want to be up where the students are so administration I took that to administration and the decision was made to I think if you remember on the map one of the small study rooms converted into a satellite office for university police and we've had a couple instances where students have remembered that there was a UNLPD presence in the building and come back to the comments from wherever they were to consult with a university police officer so that's fine they need it really but yeah they got a spot in the center of campus and they wanted to they don't want to be involved with the students so that was a relationship so we were able to accommodate that request on their part and I think it's worked out pretty well well their visibility is such we've had students walk to the commons police space when they were actually near to the police station really but they had saw and remembered that it was there we have another question about the gate counts that it looks like about a quarter of your gate counts is for donuts and coffee how does that compare to previous usage without the food or is that even it's really hard to compare what drives the gate certainly we do know that a quarter of the people come in and they do buy a donut you know why if they're there for the donut or if they're there for something else previously the way the floor was laid out we did have a circulation point of an exit but since there wasn't much on that floor other than the amenity stacks there really wasn't a reason the traffic was there other than looking very conveniently out I'm sort of anecdotal note I would say that a large number of that coffee donuts is consumed by library staff so we see a lot more of everybody in the building a lot more non-library faculty come over and find reasons to say well let's just walk over to the comments A because it's a beautiful spot it really is a lovely area it's got a great view all the way around it and it's got comfortable places to sit both inside and outside and you know they we keep talking about that donuts kind of facetiously but it is a driver it does pull people in but not everybody comes over to get a coffee and a donut it is just a beautiful comfortable place to be and people that didn't really have a reason to come to the library before or now finding reasons to come in which we're tickled about because we can share with them what other services we have available and that's protected right there so they may not have realized that that was something that we could offer and as a corollary we see use throughout the building increased by changing that form so our use of services in other spots are study areas that used in the other building that might have been sparsely populated before or now full so the entire building really gets more used by bringing people in through that building it's really such a changing attempt before you change during busy times of the semester I will be wandering through the building with my little ask us button on and I will have students come up and say we can't find any place to sit I'll say did you check here? Yeah did you check here? Yeah well let's go check oh no that's cool so I've worked at the library for 30 years and I never remember having students coming up and telling me that they need help finding some place to sit I mean that was just so that's the biggest change that personally I can see is that we are full and the time has added 500 seats to 700 that were already in the library so it's a lot people have thrown out all of our services yes you were talking about using the rest of the library and actually they had a question sort of related to that and I know you're working on going away from this but people are very curious in 24-7 do people have access to other library areas or just the comments? Just the comments so we have a security gate that closes that area with limited staffing we really didn't feel and the limited use we really didn't feel that we could afford to staff the entire complex and keep it in a safe secure manner and I wanted to probably isn't as needed as the you guys do the the longer hours you guys do the final time extended hours anyways we do have extended hours for the rest of the physical collections that aren't in the commons but they are not 24-7 through the entire building and after the sound complex closes the commons is only available to people that are affiliated with the university it's quite hard to access at that point just anybody coming in the middle of the night hang out and when we look at the summer hours we are open seven days a week in the summer from 7.30 a.m. to 2.00 a.m. so we're really talking about a small one at a time and Allison wants to know more about your high density storage some more information about that do your students request any materials from there how does that work? if we selected correctly they don't so we try to put materials out there that we need to maintain to preserve to use as an academic library part of our mission is to sort into materials so but we do get a fair amount of requests we deliver between the eight locations of which the high density facility is one and we have any material from any library to be delivered to you within 24 hours so and then that's on a personal business week so we do get a fair amount of requests from there a lot of it's in the library alone research materials that we put there in the space are scanned and sent directly everything is available so it's a complete deal a large number of special collections and archives are out there because it is our best preservation environment in terms of temperature and humidity what's that? we have just initially added a second module for high density storage facility which should come on any day now as we actively check our email every morning and that's an expansion specifically for special collections and archives and our hope is eventually as we're able to move things around in the building that we're able to free up more spaces in the complex as we move special collections out that we can maybe return some of those spaces to play for other uses more seats more offices more everything I think it's good to have that the climate control area for so many of those historical and the new facility or the added on facility before it was not a public building but we have added a reading room so that we'll have hours limited hours at first but there will be open hours where researchers can come out and we will collect materials for them and bring them out to the reading room and they can produce the special collections or the regular collections either one so we'll be treating it more like a branch rather than closed to the public the materials we put out there we tried to put out that has a specific historical or collection base needs all right that is all the questions we had so far it's a little after 11 o'clock that's okay we go as long as needed with people's questions and you guys need to share anything but I think since it is a lecture we'll wrap it up if you have any urgent last-minute questions get in right now or you know what to find out reach out to them there are any questions that we have so this was great like I said I had to attend a session at the conference which was last year though so it's been a while since it was good to hear what has happened since then I wanted to get an update on how things are going I think that's awesome yeah I need to go and take a little walk through myself and see what it's all looking like now all right doesn't look like anything desperate is coming out so I think we will wrap up for today can you slide the mouse down here for me all right so that will wrap it up for today's show the show has been recorded and will be available on our website which I will show you right now this is our library commission website where you can get to our end of the slideshow you can go to our information or you can also just google us it's so far in the internet world that cover slide is the only thing that's called that so good google us it's all that comes up this is our main page we've got our upcoming shows listed but our archives are right here right beneath our upcoming shows there's a list all of them here and the one for today will be here probably later this afternoon we've got everything cooperating with me I uploaded to youtube everyone who attended and the registrar will be notified of when the reference available this is the one from last week I'll link to the presentation if you have any slideshow and then I already have a link to the website for the library that will be available there our archives here go back to the show we started to encompass live in January 2009 and all of our recordings are also out there so feel free to go back share with anyone on the topics you think might be of interest to anybody yes some of the information will be outdated now but we are a librarian so we save things at archive it and not a lot of space needed for this I'm hard drives here and on youtube so please do take a look over there and watch anything you want to I hope you join us next week but our topic is finding your focus tips for early career success and you can't know who's also from here I'm afraid he did this session I don't know this presentation had been earlier this year and it was really good session about what to do when you're just getting started in your career in libraries so he's got some good tips and tricks on that getting involved in your career so definitely sign up for that any of our other shows coming up we're just starting to add in our August dates I've got some other topics I'm firming up and finalizing it so let's see if things added to the list here as we get to them so keep checking back there income slide is also on facebook so if you are a big facebook user please do pop over there and give us a like and I post down here reminders about today's show letting you know they can log down to live, the recordings are available I post down here so if you are involved in facebook, like us there and you'll be notified of what's going on with our show other than that that wraps it up for today thank you very much for attending thank you very much thank you for being here this is great we'll do a good trip back I'm afraid of the street obviously I hope it's not raining see you next time and love this life bye bye