From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.
Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.
From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.
Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.
Ha! Funnily enough I left WeWork because of their incessant need to blast music ALL... THE... TIME. During the times when I needed to really hunker down and grok hard material that required hours of intense focus, I would end up going to the nearby library.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your comment. The local library is packed with students throughout the day because of the availability of desks/seated areas.
Either way, that sucks. I need absolute quiet or white noise to concentrate. That would be the absolute worst work environment (Well, okay, maybe not the worst. Working as a slave on a roman war galley that was on fire and I was chained to the bench would be worse, but it would be a close second).
I can deal with background chitchat since I can tune that out but hearing music I can't stand to listen to is really hard to ignore, especially when they jack up the volume! I don't know why the insist on having music always playing, people have left the co-working space because of it. At times it felt more like a frat party than a serious place for people to get work done.
Interestingly that relates to one of the few acoustic design points I remember from an architecture paper I failed decades ago.
The point was about Libraries, and how you shouldn't design their acoustics to be as quiet as possible. When something is really quiet, small noises like someone getting up can be very disturbing. While if you design them to have an audible but muffled background murmour where details/sources can't be picked out subconsciously, people will be disturbed less when sounds do happen.
I know...I know.
Some idea really should be described as "brainfart".
I think that WeWork has really set a bad precedent here. It was the first coworking space I toured that seemed to be pushing itself as more of a social space than a place to hunker down and get some work done. Since then, though, pretty much everyone seems to be headed in that direction.
I on the other hand need noise-canceling headphones and a confined private workspace to feel really productive. To each their own I suppose!
This is a common complaint today, but maybe I’m weird, I just don’t need it. I can work with a jackhammer outside the window, or an office mate picking their toenails five feet away. When I was a kid, my Dad and I played “the artillery game”, where I would shout answers to simple math problems with music or the radio blasting. Sure I don’t like either of those things, but I can still get my stuff done. Demanding absolute stillness and silence is a bit complainy.
I've never been able to study at home. I don't know what it is. But in libraries I'm totally in the zone.
It's unfortunate because library hours are so limited. I'd love for there to be a 24 hour library that always had enough seating.
I actually had an idea starting a private membership 24hr study space that would serve primarily as a quiet study space for students. Tables, wifi, strict rules on noise...essentially using the gym business model. But I'm broke and know nothing about running a business but we can all dream.
I loved the 24 hour room back when I was a student. It was super quiet and was so starkly ugly you had no business being there unless you were getting some serious schoolwork done.
Social/peer pressure? Knowing you're accountable to others around you? I don't know about a library but for sure occasionally doing war-room at work makes me very productive (though often not directly on the thing we're war-rooming about).
Also, there's no substitute for the feeling you get from working next to a stack of physical books.
Spoken like someone who never took a humanities course.
Though the library system does have some nice places to work :-) I confess I’m more of an ambient social space worker these days. If I want solitude and quiet I can get that at home.
It was so they could DRM and/or change the content every semester to earn the school more money.
The worst is when the Prof makes their own online book required. $90+ a pop, and you can't resell at the end of the semester.
Grr.
Yes, access to the more obscure literature like the Springer books for advanced math, or highly specialized history books (such as a history of Ottoman naval warfare) is pretty essential at the graduate or later level.
But then, I remember I got half way through a copy of, I believe it was:
"Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China seas and Japan, performed in the years 1852, 1853 and 1854, under the command of M.C. Perry" Francis Lister Hawks , New York , 1856
https://bibsys-almaprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-expl...
As tangentially related to the year of Japanese I studied. Had to go to the library to read it - copy was too old and rare for me to take home (which was part of why I only got halfway through - but seeing that it's 600 pages I don't feel quite so bad about that).
Ed: looks like it is available at archive.org - not as nice as the physical book, but for the curious:
https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped0156perr
https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped01perr
(looks like two different sources?)
I once had to look for the media impact of a 1987 trial, and behold, they had the microfilm.
Let's take a moment to remember that we could digitize all this but that stupid copyright laws makes it forbidden.
I hope we manage to reform these before these libraries stop getting funded.
This was not my experience after the first 18 months. Maybe things are different than they were in the 80s. Or maybe my school was different (we had a lot of cross-functional projects), or maybe my professors were humoring me by letting me design my own upper-level (but under-grad) curriculum ... but I spent a LOT of time in the library. Sometimes to pull textbooks, but mostly to pull journal articles that described similar or adjacent research. (Or maybe I was a weird kid? That's definitely possible - but all the engineers at our school were weird kids, so I wouldn't have picked up on it.)
> Plus, a growing body of evidence shows that physical books and papers are more conducive to learning than digital formats are.
I'd also agree with the article's point that getting face-to face advice from a librarian can be a lot more helpful for research than crawling through the internet by yourself - especially of you're an undergrad.
I fell for this trap in my freshman year, but by my second year of undergrad i discovered that even though the syllabus might say i had to buy textbooks, the library actually did have copies of pretty much everything i needed.
Once I found out about the university library reserve system I cut my textbook budget in half. It was something first-gen, broke college students aren't told about that would have saved them from spending on books they only needed occassionally.
I was successful in not buying a single book throughout all of university - and it wasn't because I used the library. Everything you need is out there. Note: I didn't buy a single book because I could not afford it
In one case, a professor used a book he had written for a programming/algorithms course. "I'll make sure the library gets a bunch of those before the first homeworks are due." And sure enough, they had enough for everyone in class.
Fix your education system. Seriously, it's embarassing.
Huge libraries of books may possibly be obsolete at large universities, especially for undergrads. But when I went to school, I found immense value in my schools access to periodicals. I read them voraciously and learned how to quickly read (and later write) technical articles. It quickly became clear they were instrumental with staying up to date with the state of the art.
It’s a pity that most of these academic periodicals are out of reach for everyone outside academia, they are the closest we have to true source material.
To be honest I pity college students who never have the need - or even worse, the desire - to get books from their college library.
Unless you're majoring in classical latin, but then again, what piece of information is not digitized already? If it's not, the first user to come across that in academia should do just that.
All of my information is on my computer, and I didn't need to write down anything for almost a year now.
Digitization done well costs money and man-hours, and most humanities departments are not exactly flush with cash and manpower.
RE Latin / Classics when I was doing classical studies in 6th form in the UK I wanted to do some additional reading.
A well known eccentric classical scholar (G M Lee) used to have his personal desk set up with all the books he needed.
I had to get my Mum who worked at the library to ask the county librarian to ask him if some one else could borrow some of the books.
One time for a club I did need to find an SAE standard, and that might have been the one time I ever checked out a book for non pleasure reading.
Oh god. Somewhere you probably just spawned a demon idea: WeWork-style partnerships with universities to build "co-working" spaces on-campus.
JK - but probably not!