Hello academic library experts!We are dealing with a couple of complaints from students (I suspect because the library is very busy at present) who say that our library staff are not doing enough to manage selfish, anti-social or even noisy behaviour by other students in areas of the library designated as quite or silent zones. We’ve also had to remove a computer mouse that was super-glued to a desk top recently and that will necessitate a lot of expensive repair work to the long desk top that was damaged in the removal process.
We do have our reshelvers and security staff talk to students if they notice anything inappropriate and we can also deploy our student rovers against such behaviour, but I suspect the more that we react, the more students will either counter-react or find another way around it. Last year I talked with many US academic librarians who told me that students mostly self-manage behaviour in their library “commons” and group study spaces. We seek to gently encourage the same thing here, but we don’t want to go as far as encouraging student vigilantes and we don’t want to be too “precious” about the space.
So, I would be interested in reading about any successful initiatives you may have tried recently to encourage more cooperative, tolerant and appropriate behaviour by students in THEIR library.
The image above is the University of Nevada Las Vegas Lied Library learning commons.
