Monthly Archives: February 2010

What do you mean by 24/7?

I’ll start by talking to myself.

If you saw any of the easels in the 1st floor of Atkins in the last little while, you surely noticed (perhaps you even wrote) endless repetitions of “27/7!”

So, OK, we’re working on that. We know you want it.

But I’d like to know more. Why are you in the library at 2AM? What kind of work are you doing in the middle of the night? What about the library makes it a good space for that?

Please do not think these are judgemental questions–just because I personally am incapable of pulling an all-nighter doesn’t mean that people don’t have good, solid reasons for doing so. I know people work all night long.

We need to know, why the library? What does it have (or not have) that other places don’t (or do)? Where do you work when you can’t go to the library? What does that feel like/look like? Does it depend on the kind of work? Are you coming alone? In groups? Is it only during finals week? All semester?

You see, how just reading words on an easel can only get us so far? Please enlighten me, in the comments.

So, here we are

The easels are down, and I’m trying this instead. As the Anthropologist in the Atkins Library, my job is to find out what the UNCC community is doing, in going about getting their work done here at the university. In particular, I’d like to know what works and doesn’t work for them here at the library.

We’ve had easels up around the first floor for the last several weeks, and I think we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, where we are hearing the same suggestions over and over. Not that the suggestions are not good, but we’ve heard them now, and need to think about ways to act on the appropriate ones.

In the meantime, I need more feedback. And I’d like to be able to push back, and respond to some of the feedback you give us. One of the suggestions was that we have a blog, rather than easels or suggestion boxes. So here we are.