The buzzing of smartphones, the clacking of computer keys, the chatter of study groups: Academic libraries aren’t the quiet temples to scholarship they used to be. Personal portable technology takes some of the blame. So does the current pedagogical emphasis on group work. In response to students’ devices and habits, many libraries have installed coffee shops and embraced the learning-commons model of design, creating wired spaces where groups can gather and plug in.
Library quiet is making a comeback, though, in part because students themselves are asking for it. “Students crave quiet as much as they crave conversation,” says Karen G. Schneider, director for library services at Holy Names University, in Oakland, Calif., and proprietor of the Free Range Librarian blog. “A lot of libraries are zoning their space into areas where there can be quiet conversation, absolute silence, and even livelier conversations.”
The way librarians, students, and researchers behave undermines what Ms. Schneider calls “the stereotype of the shushing librarian and absolute pin-drop silence.” She and other librarians point out that students are often the first to bring up noise problems in the library, to ask for more quiet spaces, and to police those spaces themselves.
“We assume this is the multitasking generation. It’s how they’ve been labeled,” says Alison J. Head, co-director of the University of Washington’s Project Information Literacy, which looks at how young adults do research. But her own research has shown that “these students do seek solitude, they do seek the quaint hush of the library and a place they can dial down.”
Ms. Head’s group recently studied how college students manage technology in the library during crunch time. Students reported that they looked to the library “as a place to go to escape the social distraction of their lives,” she says. “That was the major finding of the study. One student said, ‘I’m so sick of it in my dorm. Somebody moved in a Ping-Pong table. I can’t study there.’”
Eric A. Kidwell, director of the library at Huntingdon College, in Montgomery, Ala., cites “this prevailing attitude among faculty and administrators that all students want to be in a group situation all the time.” That’s not the case, in his experience. “Maybe there’s more of that, but there are plenty of students out there who enjoy being by themselves, or can’t study with their earphones in and the TV on.”
The solution, in Mr. Kidwell’s view, is “to be as creative as we can in our space design to provide as many different types of reading and study space as we can.” The most popular room at his library is not a fully wired collaborative space but a small room that’s designed to look like an old-fashioned study. “We bought a small table, a rocking chair, a wingback chair,” he says. “We wish we had the ability to make more rooms like that.”
‘True Quiet’
The desire to get away from distractions can be found at institutions large and small, tech-heavy and humanities-focused. Agnes Scott College, a small, liberal-arts women’s college in Decatur, Ga., has about a thousand students. According to Elizabeth Leslie Bagley, director of library services, the students asked for designated quiet zones. “They supported the idea of not having laptops and iPods” in those spaces, she says. “They are pretty vigilant about policing it.”
It’s hard to ban laptops outright because students rely on them so much to get their work done. But “we try and keep the laptops away, because some people have long fingernails, and the clacking bothers their neighbors,” Ms. Bagley says. “Some people are really aggressive with their typing.”
At Agnes Scott, the library has seven floors. Generally, the higher you go, the quieter it gets. “The first floor itself does have a lot of ambient noise,” Ms. Bagley says. “So students know if they desire true quiet they need to go further up in the building structure.”
At the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, a multiyear remodeling project has gotten library staff thinking about what patrons want and need to do in the library, says Mark Mastrean, assistant dean of library and information services. As technology became more ubiquitous and distracting, the library staff created “ultra-quiet” zones. They removed shelving from a former government-documents room that had a lot of natural light and “got beautiful new artwork in there,” Mr. Mastrean says. Food and drink are allowed, “but you’ve just got to keep everything quiet. It’s taken off pretty well. It’s heavily used.”
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, students arrive expecting to be immersed in technology. Even there, however, librarians have discovered a hunger for spaces that allow patrons to concentrate.
“For a long time, it was all quiet” in the library, says Ameet Doshi, the user-experience librarian. “Suddenly we’ve seen this new teaching style that’s required us to have that group collaboration. Now students are saying, ‘I can’t study in my dorm room. I need more quiet spaces.’”
The demand that Mr. Doshi and other librarians are encountering reflects popular commentary about how we live with technology. In Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, the writer William Powers suggests that we create distraction-free “Walden zones,” at home and elsewhere, like Henry David Thoreau’s retreats to the woods in search of peace and quiet.
Sometimes such zones evolve naturally. In August 2011, Georgia Tech opened Clough Commons, a 220,000-square-foot space attached to the main library, with plenty of reservable rooms that feature white boards and other tools ideal for collaborative work. When the Clough opened last year, it doubled the library’s number of visitors, according to Mr. Doshi.
“It’s been a very heavily used space, and the students love it,” he says. “There’s this low hum of activity happening almost 24 hours a day there.”
The Clough Commons has no designated quiet zones, but a de facto quiet culture has evolved around certain spaces that “are bathed in natural sunlight or are further away from entrances,” Mr. Doshi says. Next door, at the main library, the third floor has been designated an official quiet zone, with noise-buffering cloth cubicles and signage that reinforces the keep-it-down message. (Several librarians mentioned signage as an essential ingredient in keeping quiet zones quiet.)
Mr. Doshi has found that students “guard their quiet very fiercely” there. If he talks while taking visitors on a tour through that space, “I’ll see their heads pop up like weasels.”
But Not Too Quiet
Quiet comes in many forms. Tomblike silence is not necessarily what students have in mind when they go looking for less distraction. “When we dig a little bit deeper and ask them what they mean by ‘quiet space,’ it’s not necessarily quiet in an auditory sense,” Mr. Doshi says.
Ian Bailie, a Georgia Tech junior majoring in industrial engineering, likes to be around other people when he studies. “I don’t do well in a completely silent environment when I’m doing work,” he says. But the kind of noise generated by fellow students isn’t conducive to getting much done: “It’s the noise that prompts me to look up.” So he gravitates to comfortable spaces in the library where he can put on headphones, listen to music, and focus.
Mr. Bailie, who serves on the library’s student advisory committee, would also like to see upgrades in the electrical and air-conditioning systems in the older part of the library.
More worrisome for those attached to print collections, though, is his idea that it’s time to move more bound materials off-site to make more room for patrons.
Mr. Bailie relies on databases of journal articles for his own work. “To be honest, I have not used a print book or journal for any of my research so far,” he says. “I like the idea of opening up that space for other, more innovative uses.” (Librarians are all too aware of what Ms. Schneider, of Holy Names University, calls “the space problems created by our huge print legacy collections.”)
Not far from Georgia Tech, at Georgia State University, the library has also come up against the need to manage distraction and noise. Bryan Sinclair is associate dean for public services at Georgia State’s library. A 2008 “transformation” turned it into the main computer lab on campus. The library, already popular, “became very, very popular overnight,” he says. “The first and second floor of our main building is like Grand Central Station.”
During the academic year, the library now gets 10,000 visits a day, measured by swipe-card entries. When the numbers jumped, Mr. Sinclair says, “we did start hearing concerns about ‘Where do I go for quiet study?’”
The library designated the fifth floor, he says, as a space for quiet study and contemplation, for patrons who want to get away from the commotion on the lower floors. “We didn’t realize how much that would be needed,” Mr. Sinclair says.
Given Georgia State’s location, in downtown Atlanta, Mr. Sinclair thinks that the library has a special role to play in helping students find calm. “There’s a lot of hustle and bustle,” he says. “Sometimes students just need to go somewhere and decompress. They need to go somewhere and think. We may be the only place on campus that can provide that.
Correction (July 16, 2012, 10:15 a.m.): The original version of this article incorrectly named the Georgia Institute of Technology as Georgia Tech University. The text has been corrected.
