The BSM library has had ongoing changes to its layout over the past five years, with the changing of the counselors’ offices and College and Career Center. Changes like adding more tables in the library led to less space for books, but more room for study tables and tables for student testing. This has caused a lack of use for the traditional purposes of the library, including reading and finding new books. The library is a quiet place and people tend to just view it as such, causing some students to not use it. With the inclusion of the testing center, it’s a less inviting study space and becoming even more quiet.
The library hasn’t always been a place for testing. Testing used to be done in a separate room. Testing in the library is nice because it is a quiet place to take a test away from the classroom and can help people with accommodation plans. However, this causes people who would like to use the library just to study or get work done to feel the pressure to be extra quiet to not bother the students taking a test. Some students study better when they can converse with peers and bounce ideas off of each other. However, because the library no longer allows for collaboration, students are finding other places to work and study.
Other places that students use to study and collaborate would be the Cube or Atrium. This is because in these study places, you can converse with peers, and it is a more open space that students tend to feel more comfortable in.
Another reason the use of the library may be declining is because of the decline in reading. A majority of students don’t read for fun or in their free time, and since the library is associated with reading, it may turn them off about it. This leads them again to use the other spaces BSM offers, like the Cube and Atrium.
Overall, I think that the decline of the library is something that will continue. With all the technology and other spaces to study, I do not see the library as a place that will be used for much other than testing or as a quiet study space. As the decline in reading keeps rising and the testing is being moved to the library, I see the usage of the library either staying the same or continuing to decline. Maybe if they moved the testing back to a different room or offered more than just a quiet place to study or a place to read, more people would use the library. However, I don’t see that happening in the near future.