Posted on 2015/11/11 by

Embodied Space: The Webster Library Transformation

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The Webster Library Transformation is underway and in the University’s postings about the work being done, the word ‘renovation’ is conspicuously absent possibly because it carries connotations of disrepair, age and maintenance of an old system. Maybe that’s also why it’s being touted as a “next-generation” library, which makes a kind of avowal of the timeliness of the library but also sounds like the unveiling of a new IPhone.[1] It’s similar to the previous version but somehow entirely life changing, transformative. It should not only bring us into the present age but it should project us into a time beyond our own. The library reprogrammed as scholastic utopia. The language used to describe the library’s changes is utopic in this sense that through innovation we will be taken into a new space, a hitherto imagined space that brings us not only into a different physical location, but projects us into a different conceptual space. I think the choice of the word transformation is apt and that the library will not only change the way we work and produce work as students, but as I would like to explore in this probe, the library transformation reflects and is an articulation of an already occurring shift in the way we conceptualise knowledge, the creation of knowledge and the identity of the student.

The Second floor

My preferred study space has always been the carrels (I prefer ‘cubes’) in the silent reading zone of the second floor along the windows that look down on Bishop street. The carrels are designed for the kind of individual writing work I need to do. The partitions separating each table and chair connect each student but also shields them from each other’s view. The walls act kind of like horse blinders or ‘blinkers’ as they are sometimes called, blocking out potentially distracting stimuli and directing the gaze front and centre. Sometimes I lean forward for maximum immersion or back to escape the feeling that I exist only within a word document. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard’s meditates on corners, describing this type of space fondly as a “half-box, part walls, part door” (137) a space whose construction ensures immobility and allows us to “inhabit with intensity.”(xxxviii) Bachelard claims that the only we learn how to do this by occupying these corner spaces where imagination is seemingly everything. For me this silent, ascetic method of work and student has been part of the identity of an English student. But it can also be isolating. I wonder if my work sometimes reflects the circuitous trains of thought going on in my conceptual space or the narrowness of my work space. In I wonder if I am ‘blinkered’. I can’t help but think there is something like this going on when I am cloistered in my cubicle with my texts and my lecture notes trying to construct something of value.  If the texts, the tech and the Profs are actors that influence our work then why not the spaces we produce our work in as well? In looking at the library transformation I began to see how a complex set of relations between people, objects, space and time can perform or express ideological work that informs the academic work being done at the University.

“Space that has been seized by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor.” (Bachelard, xxxvi)

The Third Floor

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As I entered the new floor of the Webster library I was sceptical, I liked my claustrophobic little cube. I had only seen digital projections of a modern looking near-bookless library populated with ghostly students. Going up to the third floor was an ambivalent experience. I couldn’t help but be struck by the vast improvement in overall aesthetics of the third floor. The lighting was bright but soft, the lines of the furniture and shelves clean and new and the colors were not stale and drained of life. And yet the territory is slightly bewildering. Walking through the library I noticed the main difference between the second and third floor is a more open concept which gives the feeling of spaciousness although the study spaces are as close or closer together than  in some areas of the second floor. Maybe this is an illusory distinction caused by the partitions in the old carrels, which have the effect of creating a bunch of little microcosms of student space. The library transformation was borne partially from a crisis of space, so it will be interesting to see how the individual, somewhat bulky space of the carrel is re-imagined.[2] This ties in with the second big difference: visibility. On the third floor you are always visible to everyone around you. The room is bounded by two glassed-in silent reading rooms with completely open tables. The workspaces are individual but communal at the same time. In between these rooms there is an open concept study area with ikeaesque tables, chairs and sofas. Talking is permitted, some students work alone along the wall looking down into the library building and others work in groups around the tables writing figures on a whiteboard. In the middle of the room there are three big glass rooms that resemble aquariums that contain groups of students working together.

For the library to do the work of a library, it must be constructed around clear delimitations. The different configurations of space must prescribe different types of behaviour. The more ingeniously these spaces are designed, the less visible the work being performed becomes.[3] The traditional library job of shushing has transformed from a slightly Orwellian image of a woman pressing her finger to her lips to an androgynous grinning emoji type symbol. Library Special Projects Manager Brigitte St. Laurent-Taddeo was kind enough to show me around and informed me that next to space two of the biggest concerns of the project was improving light and addressing noise. Concordia even hired an acoustician to find out how to promote a quiet space. The ingenuity of this floor is that in addressing the issue of light by replacing walls with glass, the visibility of the students seems to make them more prone to self-monitoring their noise levels. Even in the collaboration space students speak in hushed tones.

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In “Of Other Spaces” Foucault describes sanctification of space as “inviolable” oppositions embedded in the space itself. These oppositions of silence and noise, inside and outside, together and separate are of paramount importance to the library and the new floor’s construction makes us those (almost) perfect little door closers. I would argue that the quality of a library depends upon its status as a somewhat sacred space, where these rituals of work, these “rites and purifications” (26) have to be observed to occupy the space and make way for the production of knowledge. “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing which both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”(26) The visibility of the student at all times allows us to perceive the needs of the other student and our own interest in respecting them by being silent. When the walls of the carrels are removed, we do the work of the walls. The design of the room demands that we keep out of each other’s workspace.[4] Transparency has also been a factor in the construction of the new library spaces through the Webster Library Transformation Blog. Students are now more aware of the changes made in the configuration of space while it is happening and encourage student input. This is also indicative of the kind of student of the new library, simultaneously and seamlessly utilizing virtual and physical space and making them communicate and improve upon each other.

Perhaps this new mode of thinking and producing transparently betrays the movement from one kind of student to another, but also another way of seeing the pre-existing connections between ideas, people, disciplines and techniques that can encourage innovation and understanding. Transparency could do away with the opportunities for glitches to hide in the system, to do away with biases of knowledge and make it easier to revise and critique our thinking. In Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” we have seen how transparency is arrived at through failure of the system and crisis. The library transformation came about partly from a crisis of space but also made visible the infrastructure of knowledge production. The transformation is also an opportunity for each tiny decision to nurture and influence the changing academic environment in its uncertain and hybrid form.

“In the everyday world, it is of shattered, scattered sacredness that we must speak […]” -Marc Augé, “An Ethnologist in the Metro.”

Naming is also important to note. The reading rooms in the third floor are named after countries namely, Kenya, France, Netherlands, Vietnam and India. In Marc Augé’s study of the Paris metro he notes the way that the historical names of the metro stops have shifting significations for different users and generations of users.[5] The naming of the reading rooms eschews the local in favour of the global. Library Special Project Manager Brigitte St. Laurent-Taddeo was kind enough to show me around and explained that the choice of countries corresponds to research done on the cultural backgrounds of the student population at Concordia. She also mentioned that the naming has not gone unnoticed by students and they’ve taken to referring to the rooms by their international names. This is indicative not only of the diversity of the students but also of the widening of scope from the local, historical to the global and mobile. The West is potentially dethroned as the priveledged centre of knowledge production. Foucault argues that “The museum and the library are heterotopias proper to Western culture of the nineteenth century.” (26), however the twenty first century sees the access to that wealth of knowledge broadened by our access via digital archives which makes us mobile, living libraries. At the same time that certain rites have to be performed to utilize the space, there is a corresponding de-sacralization of the library as site of knowledge.  A corresponding change in physical access to books may be coming as the library aims to make more space for student. That student also occupies a different kind of space emerging from the individual space of the lone genius to the public and social space of the “next-generation” library. There is no arcane knowledge in this space, or rather it has lost its position of power in favour of the everyday as the cultural ground shifts, hierarchies of knowledge slip, high and low culture is renegotiated. Moreover the process of how these valuations of knowledge come to be is made visible and studied. This change in the conception of knowledge might mean the disappearance of a certain type of scholar or simply the transformation of his work.

“In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.” –Foucault “Of Other Spaces”

The stacks themselves are also a part of the transformation. The collections movement from the second to the third floor necessitated a paring down of the books. The task of ‘weeding’ removes from the collections all redundant, out-dated and damaged books and donating them to an archive or another institution. The out-dated books fascinated me the most, to imagine all the once relevant ideas in those books becoming artefacts is part of the process of knowledge making but still chills me but even to be wrong means one is playing a part in the creation of knowledge and that some can only hope to be a blip on the academic radar.[6]This pruning of material betrays the already apparent role of artefact, the books have been assessed by the decreasing frequency with which they are requested, and their unpopularity pointing to newer modes of thought; their removal is just the solidification of their non-agency. Although the library assures me that they never simply throw out books, I can’t help but wonder if anything is lost in the increasing digitization of documents. Increasingly, students can access information across different mediums and using new tools, which entail a different experience of learning.

The new library has also added two different types of spaces with the express purpose of showing work, The Multipurpose Room and the Visualization Room. Both rooms provide students with the use of equipment and space designed to share their projects. The inclusion of this room speaks to the imperative to have our work be visible so that others can interact with it. The use of a variety of techniques that crosses disciplines, allows different disciplines to perceive existing connections between areas of study. We see this at work in the MLab, as the different tools and theoretical lenses used take Joyce’s Ulysses beyond the English Lit stacks and seminars. It also speaks to the benefit of visibility in academia through the diffusion of work on blogs and social media. Once mostly a tool for mediating our personal lives, the growing authority of these types of forums allows work to traverse boundaries of academic prestige, defy categories of discipline and exist in experimental forms. And now to digress to another space…

Ninth Floor, Hall Bldg

An incident in the University’s history elucidates articulations of space, transparency, visibility, infrastructure, technology and access to knowledge.The Computer Centre Incident of 1968 was a student riot incited by allegations of racism directed at six West Indian biology students from a faculty member. After talks degenerated at a Hearing Committee formed to investigate the charges, two hundred students occupied the computer centre in the Hall building. Over the next two weeks negotiations were carried out almost to the point of a compromise but failed just as half the students left the protest, the argument reignited and the remaining one hundred students carried out their threat to destroy the computers, causing extensive damage to the building as well. There are many things that are interesting about this story is the way the public space is contested and shown to be already a part of the political and ideological struggles at the university. The student’s choice to occupy the computer centre and threaten the technology in order to leverage their claims shows that they perceived where value and power was situated spatially in Concordia. What is demoralizing is that they wanted recognition of injustice so badly that they would destroy the very spaces and objects that were integral to their own research and identity as students. This incident resulted in the arrest of students, the eventual reinstatement of the accused faculty member and millions of dollars in damage. The computer lab is still on the ninth floor of the Hall building and no traces of the riot remain but the conflict resulted in the re-organization and institution of student representation and a restructuring of policies and codes that govern university life. Interestingly, the Paris protests were happening at the same time, students occupied the streets and took to turning over cars when they couldn’t get their institutions to cooperate. The ideological changes though not completely effected, can be communicated through violence to space. At the same time, the anarchic violence to space is an attack on an expression of ideology, power and forms of social ordering.

Today space at Concordia is increasingly heterogeneous and political and ideological action is intrinsic to the construction of space. If we look at other spaces in the University, memorials, cafes, corners, thresholds, we can see how structure and design can redistribute power to the students. There are as many struggles, stories and resistances as there are spaces in Concordia. The library transformation’s policy of transparency and ongoing construction gives us the opportunity to contribute our own ideas and opinions. Even better the library is an extension of the classroom; part lab, part experiment, a heterotopia that belongs to everyone and no one.

[1] Webster Library Transformation Blog

[2] “At present, only .57 m2 of space is allocated for each full-time equivalent (FTE) student. This ranks as the lowest space per FTE among comparable Quebec and Canadian university libraries.”[2] https://library.concordia.ca/about/transformation/

[3] See Star’s The Ethnology of Infrastructure.

[4] Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.” Concept of strategies of translation improving network strength. (6)

[5] Auge, “An Ethnologist in the Metro” (275)

Works Cited

“Webster Library Transformation.” Libraries. Concordia University, 5 Mar 2015. Web. 1 Nov 2015.

“Collection Reconfiguration Project: One large step towards a healthy collection.” Webster Library Transformation. Concordia University, 2 Feb 2005. Web. 1 Nov 2015.

“Our vision for the Webster library.” Concordia University, 19 Nov 2014. JPEG.

“Computer Centre Incident.”Records Management and Archives. Concordia University, Feb 2000. Web. 5 Nov 2015.

Augé, Marc. “An Ethnologist in the Metro.” Journal of the Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Print.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miscowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” The Johns Hopkins University Press. 16.1 (1986): 22-27. JSTOR.  Web. 1 Nov 2015.

Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.”Center for Science Studies Lancaster University. (1992): 1-11. Web. 5 Nov 2015.

Sayers, Jentery. “The Long Now of Ulysses.” Maker Lab in the Humanities. 21 May 2015. Web. 7 Nov 2015.

Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist. 43 (1999): 377-389. Sage. Web. 2 Nov 2015.

St. Laurent-Taddeo, Brigitte. Personal interview. 11 Nov 2015.

 

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