Essays • Small Change, Big Impact 1

Small Change, Big Impact

Assessment and Creative Repurposing of Underutilized Space at the BU Theology Library

by Sean Smith

The BU School of Theology Library is a small, autonomous library on the campus of the large Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. The library is primarily committed to serving the School of Theology community of about three hundred graduate students. As a staff, we pride ourselves in creating a welcoming environment for our community and the open public. This small slice of campus was last renovated in 1999. One of our strengths is that we offer many excellent places for individualized, quiet study (e.g., high-walled carrels and a quiet reading room). Unfortunately, the library (and entire School of Theology building) lacks true collaborative study areas. Despite staff knowing this imbalance of study space, there had been no serious conversation about creating these spaces for collaborative study, perhaps due to a perceived lack of demand from students or a sense of resignation that any change would cost more than the budget could bear.

Assessment: BU Theology Library Taking a Hard Look at Itself

In 2016, BU Libraries completed its Library Survey Report, which included faculty and student feedback on the School of Theology Library.1 Although the staff was happy with the net-positive feedback, the survey identified several areas where the library could improve. The most significant of these was patron demand for better collaborative study options. These survey results served as a wake-up call that suggested the library needed to effect change to better meet the needs of our users by offering more collaborative study spaces. While 76% of graduate student respondents were “very satisfied” with the offering of individual study areas, only 25% felt “very satisfied” about group study spaces. A surprising 40% of respondents answered “not applicable” when asked about group study spaces. It was clear that the library had to begin developing long-term answers to this identified weakness, but do so without forfeiting the relative “strength” of excellent individual study space. The Theology Library had to formulate a response while considering that additional resources were extremely limited. There was proof there was a demand for this space, and for my colleagues and myself, continuing the status quo via resignation was not a tenable option.

The staff decided that intensely local research was needed to determine which underutilized areas within the existing footprint were available for a reimagination to fill the need expressed by our community. Inspired in particular by the work of Given and Leckie and Given and Archibald, we moved forward with a “seating sweeps” project in Spring 2017.2 Based on this project, the staff had hard data about underutilized spaces in the library’s footprint. Staff hypotheses about space usage were confirmed by the results of this seating sweeps project, a result likely expected in small, academic libraries, where staff may be more familiar with the ebbs and flows of patron usage than in larger academic counterparts. The data collected were invaluable to the library in its assessment: it helped non-librarian stakeholders and decision makers understand the space’s utilization, and it made more convincing the proposal for a larger-scale remedy.

1 Boston University Libraries Assessment Committee, “Boston University Libraries 2016 Survey Report,” Boston University, February 2017, https://hdl.handle.net/2144/20332.

2 Lisa M. Given and Heather Archibald, “Visual traffic sweeps (VTS): A research method for mapping user activities in the library space,” Library & Information Science Research 37 no. 2 (2015): 100-108; Lisa M. Given & Gloria J. Leckie, “Sweeping the library: Mapping the social activity space of the public library,” Library & Information Science Research 25 (2003): 365-385.