Valentines feedback wall: love or hate seat hogging!
On our Valentine’s Day feedback wall, we asked how you felt about seat hogging, if it was a love/hate thing. The results show that you do LOVE it, but mainly because you feel there are not enough seats in the Main Library and seat hogging allows you to keep the seat you’ve managed to get. We know this is a divisive issue. We introduced Parking Tickets in response to previous feedback on know how strongly you feel about it.
Thank you to everyone who left a comment. The wall was up for only 24 hours, so we are really happy to get 132 post-its in total! We are glad you like the love heart sherbet sweets and heart-shaped stress ball key rings 😉
Here is a breakdown of the comments:
43 LOVE seat hogging (32.5% of comments).
30 HATE seat hogging (23% of comments).
(Of this 30, 7 comment that they only hate it is for long periods, for example over an hour).
26 other comments – thank you for sending love to Library staff, we appreciate your kind words (we love you guys too, :”>).
5 guilty of seat hogging, echoing the overall sense that this is considered a necessary evil.
10 could see both sides or think it is OK in certain circumstances, love and hate.
10 in different languages (translations gratefully received!).
8 comment on the lack of space.
We are continually looking at ways to improve how we can provide study space for you. We asked your feedback about the particular issue of seat hogging to highlighting the problem and try to find out your suggestions for making things better. A recent article in The Saint quoted a student on this topic:
One student wrote online during the exam season, “At the moment there are only 670 people in the library and yet there are (as far as I can tell from trawling all three floors) zero (0) free desk spaces in the entire building. In a library with a capacity of 1027 desk users, how is this possible?”
“It’s possible because about 300 people are putting their stuff on desks and then leaving the library building. If people didn’t do this, there would not be a capacity problem. Only 670 people want to use the library right now, and yet some of those people can’t because people who aren’t [sic] currently using the library are taking up space.” (The Saint: http://www.thesaint-online.com/2018/02/student-frustration-over-exam-organisation/)
The University does have plans to redevelop the Library basement (Level 1) to provide over 300 new seats, but this is a few years away (the delay is because in order to add study spaces to Level 1, we need to relocate our collections store and staff accommodation. These are to move to Eden Campus which won’t be completed until late 2019. This means the work in the Main Library can’t be done until Summer 2020). In the meantime, we are looking at ways to move books and furniture to create more spaces in the Main Library (50 more this summer), are planning our budget to increase opening hours in St Marys Library, have opened Martyrs up to all Postgraduates (not just research students and staff) and will be taking over management of the study space in the Gateway Building. We also work with University colleagues to promote spaces opened up for use during exams and revision and highlight 24 hour pc classrooms you can access when the Library is closed or there are not spaces.
We are working hard to make the improvements we can, and ask for your help.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please email: [email protected]