Mapping the habits of users and their use of spaces in university libraries: an experience of seating sweep

Brodkom, Frédéric [UCL] Lesuisse, Muriel [UCL]

Since the paper of Given & Leckie (Libr. Infor. Sci. Res. 2003) about the use of ethnographic methods in libraries to define how students make use of their (!) spaces in libraries, few experiences have been published in Europe. A contact with a Canadian team having applied this kind of end‐user survey to map the social activities in libraries (9th Northumbria Conf., May & Swabey 2011) was our starting point to experiment the “sweeping” method of analysis in the Library of science and technology (UCL). As a relocation project of our old library of the seventies has been planned into a new building for 2015, the survey was also an opportunity to rethink the spaces and the services of our library. What are the habits and the activities of our users, mainly digital natives? What is their use of the spaces? What are they doing with our reading tablets available? And when and how? The responses given by the survey will improve our efficiency to plan changes, to argument our discussions with architects, to select furniture and equipments and, why not, to invent new services. Our methodology to “sweeping the seats” consists to realise a 30’ tour of the library and to record for each user his profile (student, staff …), his location (rooms for groups, reading table, information desk …) and his activity (studying alone or working in groups, with or without our books! browsing the web, with or without Facebook! eating or sleeping …). The survey is conducted by a young and discreet librarian who records this information on a check‐list with 10 different spaces and 25 different activities. The project, conducted between September 2011 and June 2012, consist to repeat this short 30’ survey at 60representative moments of the academic calendar. After 5 months and 1.295 records, the trends reflected for the period are already significant: 28% of users are studying alone without our books, only 5% are not students, 22% are in small rooms for groups, 18% are on the Web but not in the library databases, etc. The communication at the 2012 Liber Conference will present the methods and check‐lists, the final results, the statistical analysis and, of course, the lessons learned from this survey in parallel to our LibQUAL+ results.