University of British Columbia - Irving K Barber Learning Centre

---

Brilliant day

We had such a brilliant day today at UBC. The day was organised well and we had the chance to visit the Irving k Barber Learning Centre, the Walter Koerner Library and the Special Collections and Archives. On top of that we had discussions about learning spaces, institutional repositories and research support.

Highlight of the day: watching the Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) do its thing.

Irving k Barber Learning Centre

The Irving k Barber Learning Centre was really inspiring. Majority of stock relegated to deep store to provide wide variety of study areas, some casual, some formal, all spacious. The photos do not get across the sheer spaciousness of the building. A genuine attempt to meet the widest variety of user study space needs and to use visual cues regarding expected behaviour rather than signage.
Security boundary pushed right back to only cover areas of open shelves so that almost all the building is just openly accessable to everyone - no barriers at entrance at all. This illustrates geographical location of campus a long way from residential areas so not practical in London but the welcoming effect was pretty obvious.

---

Comments

[Owen Stephens]

Automated Retrieval System
How did this work? I've always felt it would be great to have one, but our users still do seem to like browsing the shelves...

[umyl026]

Automated retrieval
You build a large empty container and line the whole thing out with warehouse racks, You put your stock in large metal baskets that fill up the racks. As user searches the catalogue and finds the item they want is located in A R system so they click to say they would like to read it and head for the pick up point which is the circulation desk. As they walk through the building the robot scoots up the aisle and raises the arm to unhook the basket containing the chosen book. The whole basket is retrieved and the robot speeds up the aisle to deliver the basket less than 2 minutes after the user 'clicked' The member of staff collects item from basket and issue it at the counter.

[Owen Stephens]

There has been some discussion on a mailing list (code4lib) in the last week about the 'browsing the shelves' experience, and the issues around recreating it in a virtual environment. One of the correspondents suggested that one of the strengths of browsing the shelves is that you can pick up an item and make a judgement on it there and then - not possible if you just browse a catalogue record (although possibly with enhanced information in/linked to the catalogue this might be done better). I guess that this type of system really removes the possibility of shelf browsing completely, so if there is something key about that experience it needs working out if/how you can offer a similar experience.

[umyl026]

browsing
It is true that this system removes browsing but from the stock in the deep store only 100 items were selected on a daily basis. The regularly circulating stock was in 2 more traditional library reading rooms that you could browse. They made the decision that providing additional reader space and study area variety was more important than the value of browsing lower use material. When space is restricted that argument makes sense especially if your face to face users are mainly UG.