SPEC Kit 308: Graduate Student and Faculty Spaces and Services

ARL member libraries have begun to experiment with an enriched set of spaces and services to meet the complex teaching, learning, and research needs of graduate students and faculty. Some libraries have introduced small sanctuaries (study rooms or lounges) for graduate students and faculty as distinctly separate from undergraduate spaces. Others are providing new suites of services like dissertation support, curriculum design, and learning object design. In some cases, the services are offered in collaboration with other campus units—perhaps the Faculty Development Office, the Learning Technology Office, or Campus Computing. The new services and spaces may be localized in a discrete area (sometimes called a “research commons” or “faculty commons”) or opportunistically distributed across the library system. This survey explored the variety of resources and services being delivered or envisioned specifically for faculty and/or graduate students, the location(s) of service delivery, service point staffing, partners in service delivery, marketing of services, and assessment of the use of these spaces and services.