Week Six Reading

The week of interior design!  I must admit, I love this stuff-- aside from library/edtech blogs, shelter blogs are what I follow in my spare time.  But I wonder, to what extent does the librarian have a say over these design choices?  Do furniture and organizational materials get factored into budgets, or do you just have to make the best with whatever is provided by the administration?

During last semester in SI 647, we had to give presentations regarding issues of innovative services and an entire group of my peers chose to explore issues of space and place within libraries.  Many students looked at libraries as this necessary "third place"-- not quite work, not quite home-- and I think that this concept can apply to the role of a library in a school.  It has been mentioned during discussions that the library is often a place where administrators and other teachers go to escape within the school.  I think it's the same for many students.  It's not quite the locker/hallway but not quite the classroom, and I think that this also has to play an important role in how we set up our spaces.

For the most part, I think that the Baule article did a good job of highlighting the ways in which school librarians can design their way to being seen as a more important physical presence in the school.  However, I really disagree that one should make sure a space is flexible but not flexible enough to ever be commandeered as a classroom.  I think that we should create the best spaces that will suit the needs of our students.  If the school needs a special ed classroom, seriously fork over the space and make sure what's left of your library is worth keeping around.  This is a critique that I have of a lot of library literature out there-- we seem cautious/reactionary as opposed to adaptable, and it is frankly unbecoming of our profession.

Flexibility was an important point in every reading this week.  Times are changing, and the space has to change for all the different teaching strategies and technologies that are developing as well.  In the 90s, library spaces had to change due to the addition of computers.  How will spaces have to change to anticipate handheld technology or remote classroom environments?  Another 647 presentation last semester asked if a library would still be a library if there weren't any books at all.  Is it?

I see we have a polyvore/pinterest project for this week. Both are awesome sites to find inspiration, but as a future tip for my fellow classmates, floorplanner.com is one of my favorite sites for planning design projects.  Sign up for a free account and you can create basic floorplans to help you decide how to move around furniture or how a new piece will fit into a pre-existing setup.  It's been a major time-saver for me (or maybe not seeing as how I can play around with this site for hours).

Lastly and on an unrelated note, that Holmes quote from Ross Todd's article totally rocked my world: "The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live"