Cresswell, Melissa K

Pumroy, Eric

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Library Staff Research and Scholarship Library and Information Technology Services(LITS)
2012
Participatory Design for Canaday Library – A First
Floor Renovation
Melissa K. Cresswell
Bryn Mawr College, mcresswell@brynmawr.edu
Eric Pumroy
Bryn Mawr College
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_pubs
Part of the Library and Information Science Commons
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_pubs/12
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.
Custom Citation
Cresswell, M. K., & Pumroy, E. (2012). Participatory Design for Canaday Library—A First Floor Renovation. In Participatory Design
in Academic Libraries: Methods, Findings, and Implementations . Retrieved from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub155
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   1
Participatory Design for Canaday Library – A First Floor 
Renovation 
Melissa Cresswell 
Director of Planning and 
Communication, Information 
Services 
Bryn Mawr College 
Bryn Mawr, PA 
mcresswell@brynmawr.edu 
 
Eric Pumroy 
Director of Library Collections and 
Seymour Adelman Head of 
Special Collections, Information 
Services 
Bryn Mawr College 
Bryn Mawr, PA 
epumroy@brynmawr.edu
 
Project Overview 
This paper is an interim report on a project to gather information about student 
use of Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr College and student opinions of how they 
would like to be able to use the library in the future. This information is being 
gathered using participatory design methodologies and is intended to inform 
renovations to the first floor of Canaday. At the time this paper was written (May 
2012), data collection was complete and analysis had begun and would continue 
through August 2012. 
Bryn Mawr College is a small, liberal arts college near Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania, with 1,300 full-time equivalent undergraduates representing 45 
states and 62 countries. Four hundred graduate students currently comprise the 
College’s Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences and Social Work and Social 
Research. 
Canaday Library was built in 1969 and is the main library on campus. The first 
floor, by far the most heavily trafficked, is home to the circulation desk (fig. 1), the 
reference desk, the computing help desk (fig. 1), a computer lab (fig. 3), an 
exhibition space, the Writing Center, the reference collection (figs. 1-3), current 
periodicals, popular fiction, and a variety of staff offices. The seating and work 
space ranges from tables with computer workstations (fig. 3), to empty tables and 
clusters of soft seating (fig. 2). 
 
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   2
 
Figure 1. Canaday first floor Circulation (L) and Computing Help (R) desks 
 
Figure 2. Canaday first floor work and seating areas 
 
Figure 3. Canaday first floor computer lab and reference collection 
Timeline and Planning 
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   3
The College is planning a capital campaign that is likely to include renovations to 
Canaday Library, particularly the main public floors, among its fundraising goals. 
A participatory design project was first conceived in fall 2011 to help inform the 
planning process, but the need to accelerate the project became evident in late 
fall when the College hired an architect to scope a renovation project. 
Longitudinal data from the Managing Information Services Organizations (MISO) 
Survey1 already told us that the library as a space has become increasingly 
important to students and decreasingly important to faculty. With student input as 
top priority, we attended participatory design workshops hosted by the Council on 
Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in September and December of 2011 
to learn ethnographic methods for gathering input into the design process. 
The timeline for this project (fig. 4) is relatively short. The detailed project 
description and sample instruments required by the College’s Institutional Review 
Board (IRB) accelerated the planning process, and the project was approved in 
an expedited review in February 2012. 
 
 
Figure 4. Participatory Design Project Timeline 
Methods 
In January 2012, we recruited four colleagues to join the project team and chose 
four methods for collecting data. We used a blanket email to recruit students for 
design workshops and photo interviews. During April and May, seven students 
participated in photo interviews, and ten students participated in design 
workshops. Each was  compensated with a $25 Amazon gift certificate. A 
combination of project team members and student employees videorecorded 
these conversations using Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Cameras and tabletop 
tripods. Further information about the project team and instruments used is 
                                                 
1
 http://www.misosurvey.org/ 
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   4
available on the project website.2 
In addition to the photo interview and design workshop, we mounted a comment 
board (fig. 5) as an easy, low-investment way to gather casual comments from 
library users. We publicized the board, which hung in Canaday from spring break 
through graduation, with posters across campus (fig. 6) and on the Information 
Services Facebook and Twitter feeds. We collected more than 380 comments, 
approximately 60 of them unique, and all have been transcribed by a student 
employee in preparation for analysis. 
 
 
Figure 5. Cards used for posting to the comment board 
                                                 
2
 http://www.brynmawr.edu/is/canadayrenovation.html 
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   5
 
Figure 6. Poster advertising comment board 
We also wanted to gather quantitative data on how the library is being used to 
help us understand and flesh out what the students were telling us through the 
comment cards and interviews. For about six weeks, from shortly after spring 
break until the end of finals week, we had circulation student workers count the 
number of people on each floor several times a day, every other day. The 
guidelines for the count were set up to answer a number of questions we think 
are critical for understanding how students use the building. Specifically, we 
wanted to know who uses the building, how the use changes over the course of 
the day and evening, where students work, how often they engage in group work, 
and the percentages of students using their own computers, the library’s 
computers, and no computers. 
Preliminary Findings 
The last of the photo and design interviews were completed only in late April, but 
we already have some preliminary results about what students want. Most of the 
findings were not surprising: students want more natural light, big tables where 
they can spread out their work, private group study spaces, more comfortable 
furniture, plants, color, and, more broadly, space for both social interaction and 
quiet work, and the ability to study alone, but with others. We also had some 
surprises. Many students don’t have or want the latest gadgets; few students 
mentioned coming to the library for books, although they expect them to be here; 
and there is very little active use of the study carrels on the upper floors, instead 
almost all of the activity is concentrated in the two areas where the computers 
2012 CLIR Seminar: Cresswell and Pumroy   6
are located. 
Because the data collection was only recently completed, the analysis of it is only 
just beginning. Over the next two months we will be reviewing the interviews and 
comment board notes to identify major themes, and will code the videos with 
NVivo. The building counts were done by hand and they are still being entered 
into an Excel spreadsheet, but once that work is completed, we will develop 
queries to extract the critical data. Later this summer we will share the 
preliminary findings with the rest of the Information Services staff for comments 
and discussion. 
Lessons Learned 
Even while the study was in its early stages, discussion about the scope of library 
renovations was going on within the College, which meant there was a need for 
us to report findings as early as possible. Because we had used multiple 
methods to gather student thinking about the library, we were able to triangulate 
among the results to offer observations with a reasonable degree of confidence.  
We have come to appreciate how quantitative data can help inform the gathering 
of qualitative data. Because of the time pressure to conduct the study this spring, 
we did both the building counts and interviews simultaneously. We wish now that 
we had done the building counts earlier, because they told us that the quiet study 
floors were almost completely unused in the evenings, something that we had 
not understood, and therefore did not pursue in the interviews. Now we are 
considering a follow-up project, probably this fall, consisting of either photo or 
video interviews and design workshops focused on quiet areas, so we can get a 
better idea of why students find them unattractive and what could be done to 
make them more usable.  
Finally, we found that the project has been valuable even if there are no major 
renovations to the building in the next few years because it has given us a much 
sharper view of the students’ academic life and how the library figures in their 
work. We now know that there are some important changes that we need to 
make in the building to make it a better student space, and whether those 
changes are big or small and incremental, they will be made. 
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 


Participatory Design for Canaday Library – A First Floor Renovation

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&amp;context=lib_pubs

Participatory Design for Canaday Library – A First Floor Renovation

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College