Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget (Digital Age Librarians) - Softcover

[chapter intro]
Before we can transform our library spaces, we need first to take a good, hard look at what we’ve got to work with. It’s vital to spend some time analyzing the physical space, observing how students and teachers use the space, and surveying your school community to identify their needs.
[CN]Chapter 4
[CT]Taking Stock of Your Library Space
As we prepare to transform and reimagine our library spaces, it is crucial to take stock of our spaces. Even the most out-of-date, poorly designed school library has elements that work for students. There are easy changes that we can implement once we take the time to observe how our current space works and evaluate the resources that are already available to us.
Taking stock of your library space will take some time, but the process is worth it. If we immediately jump into making changes without thinking things through, we can make costly decisions that waste funds and create environments that don’t support or welcome our students. It will be much harder to get stakeholder buy-in after making such mistakes.
Taking stock of your space involves three elements: inventorying your space, surveying your community, and forming a library design team. When inventorying the space, we take a look at what’s already there and see what things we’ve been overlooking. Surveying your community through both question-and-answer surveys and a focus group will help you gain a better idea of the needs and interests of your users. A library design team will help in using design thinking to process the information you’ve collected, and it will help brainstorm workable solutions.
[A]Inventorying Your Physical Space
The first step is to take an inventory of the physical space of our libraries. This process requires a bit of time and effort, but it’s well worth it to gain some perspective into how your library currently functions. The inventory will help you to identify strengths and weaknesses in your library space. It will also help you to find areas to focus on as you work to transform the space. There may be elements of your space of which you were unaware. If you’ve been in your library space for a long time, this step is especially relevant because your familiarity with how the space has been used can make it more difficult to imagine fresh layouts or unusual arrangements that you might otherwise have visualized.
[Insert Figure 4.1]
[cap]Figure 4.1: Excel layout diagram sketch of Stewart Middle Magnet School Media Center in 2016.
[B]Create a Layout Diagram[/B]
Interior designers and architects often start their design and redesign of a space by creating a layout diagram of the area. We don’t necessarily need to break out the drafting table to accomplish this—there are many easy solutions for creating diagrams of our library spaces. You don’t need to be an architect or be proficient in CAD to do this. Even a simple sketch on paper, or a doodle in Microsoft Paint, can help us to plan. That said, if you’re working with an architect or a vendor, they are often more than happy to create a professional diagram of your space for you, often free of charge.
A to-scale diagram of your space helps you to get a better idea of how the room flows and what you can change. If you create pieces to represent your furniture (e.g., shapes in Excel or paper cutouts), then you can rearrange and rethink your space without moving a single piece of furniture. Creating a layout diagram can be as complex or simple as you like. The main idea is to get a feel for your space and how everything works together.
For a detailed tutorial on how to create a layout diagram in Microsoft Excel, refer to the following feature on creating a layout diagram in Excel,” adapted from my blog post titled, “How to Create a Floor Plan in Excel” (renovatedlearning.com/2016/08/29/floorplan-space-excel). Visit the post to watch a YouTube tutorial that demonstrates each of the steps. You can also download a copy of the Stewart Media Center Excel layout, which you can use as a starting template for your own.
[[KIM-The author intended this as a box but, due to the length and trim, perhaps you can style it like one of the library profiles? In place of “Library Profile” you could call it “Tutorial.” Adding an icon with a ruler or graph paper might work. There are probably a couple more of these boxes in the text that we could label as tutorials.]]
Creating a Layout Diagram in Excel
1. Create a rough draft on graph paper (or sketch it out on regular paper).
This step might seem counterintuitive, but it’s easier to sketch out your floor plan on graph paper first, and then take that information to make a spreadsheet. Grab a tape measure, and measure the boundaries of the room(s) for which you’re creating the floor plans (make sure to take notes as you go). If you have access to the blueprints, use those. Using one square on the graph paper to represent one square foot, draw out the basic boundaries of the space. Now it’s time to put the stuff in your space.
2. Measure ALL THE THINGS!
Measure the length and width of every table, desk, chair, storage unit, etc., in your space. Write down the measurements on a notecard. For now, you don’t need to worry about exactly where they fall in the area. What you DO need is a list of how many of each item you have and their sizes (e.g., six 30"×60" tables, four 36"×90" bookshelves, etc.). Don’t worry about the height—that isn’t a factor in this spreadsheet. Once you’ve got all the data written down, it’s time to transfer that to the computer.
3. Set up your spreadsheet like a grid.
Excel spreadsheets start out with wide columns, which doesn’t work well for floor plans. I like to create a grid of squares where each square represents one square foot. That makes it the easiest for planning out the space. Select all of your columns and adjust their widths until they look close to perfect squares. You can test this by creating a square and seeing if it fits correctly in a row and column when you rotate it, but if that sounds complicated, don’t stress out—it doesn’t have to be perfect.
4. Create the boundaries of your space in Excel.
Decide how many square feet each square on your grid will represent. I prefer one square foot per grid square, but that’s me. Count out the boundaries of your space based on your scale, and highlight those squares. Create a bold border around this area to help you see the scale you have. Note: If your room isn’t rectangular, this might be tricky. Remember, your diagram doesn’t have to be perfect, so just do the best you can.
5. Create fixed objects.
If individual elements of your space are fixed in one place, such as wall mounted library shelves or a circulation desk, add them straight to the grid. For the shelves at Stewart, I highlighted the areas where they are located and colored those squares burgundy. This step helps me to get a visual idea of where they are, and it’ll be useful in the next step when creating furniture items.
6. Set up and arrange your furniture items.
Using the measurements you took earlier, create the furniture pieces of your space. Your furniture icons can be as simple or complex as you like. Basic rectangle shapes tend to work best for most things. I like to color code my shapes in colors similar to the furniture items because it helps me to remember what they are. Try to position the objects relatively as they are now.
7. Group items as needed.
If there’s a certain grouping of furniture that always goes together (e.g., chairs at computer tables), you can group the items...