Well, change and decay in all around I see, as the old hymn has it. From where I sit, in the library at Turitea, the situation has become exponentially worse \u2013 the large study tables have returned but they are now occupied by groups of students who are not only talking but eating food and drinking coffee, some of which they have purchased on the premises. The area where the card catalogue used to be is now full of computers with students checking their email, using sms English to talk about their lives on Facebook and watching a snake eating an egg on Youtube. Meanwhile librarians glide apathetically by as if all this were totally normal, pausing only to offer advice on how to print six PowerPoint slides to a page or to download an article from the Journal of Happiness Studies. Is any reading being done at all? Should we be ditching the word library, with its dated connotation of books, and calling it the infozone instead?<\/p>\n
Maybe we should, or maybe the modernisation of university libraries is simply a desperate attempt to keep up with \u201cyoung people today\u201d rather than to guide them towards more scholarly paths. (Massey is not alone in this by the way \u2013 University Librarian John Redmayne recently returned from a study tour of British universities where the trend for libraries to become social centres is well underway.) But I\u2019m not convinced that a golden age of quiet libraries really did exist, and I\u2019m also not sure that students really are reading less (or that librarians are to blame). My recollection of studying in the Victoria University library was that, when I wasn\u2019t staring out the window at the view, I was listening to multiple narratives going on around me about Saturday night parties, breakups with boyfriends and hopeless parents. The library staff were truly terrifying, but they were pretty much confined to the green zone around the lending and reference desks while out in the suburbs mob rule prevailed \u2013 if we didn\u2019t mess with them by asking questions they didn\u2019t come upstairs and tell us to shut up. If I wanted to do any serious reading I took the book back to my flat and blotted out any distractions by turning up my stereo.<\/p>\n
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Expecting young people in the same space not to talk is always difficult, but I think that we have done pretty well in designating some areas of the library as quiet zones and allowing talking in others. Certainly complaints about noise haven\u2019t increased. When it was first suggested that food and drink should be tolerated a lot of us waited for the sky to fall but, apart from the odd plate of wedges or pizza, it is no big deal. Libraries have always performed an important social function and, just as the ambience has moved beyond polished wood and deathly silence , so the selling of food and coffee in libraries has made the transition from fashionable to normal.<\/p>\n
So are students reading less? They certainly borrow fewer books than they did, but then they also have access to a vast bulk of online material that did not exist ten years ago. My view is that all sorts of factors probably impact here \u2013 semesterisation, the internet, part-time work, different types of assignments and courses \u2013 but that libraries and librarians are still effectively doing what we do, connecting people with information and readers with books. If writing an essay means using a computer, and if coffee comes with everything, then it seems to me that we are there, as central to the lives of students and academic staff as we have ever been. Although we librarians like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe the truth is that as the world changes so do we. And that\u2019s no bad thing.<\/p>\n
Bruce White
\nCollege Liaison<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some years ago a senior Massey academic explained to me why students were reading less than they had in his day. The blame, it seemed, lay squarely with libraries. He had fond memories of long tables, squeaky linoleum floors and librarians who could silence you with a single stare if you so much as sniffed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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