The Impact of “Scholar's Workstations” in an Undergraduate Academic Library

Summary

The Eastern Connecticut State University library planned, with the new facility, a new configuration for user computers to be one-stop-shopping “Scholar's Workstations.” The impact on reference services was dramatic, resulting in modifications in staffing, policies/procedures, printing practices, user orientation and education, etc. Moreover, the reference librarians were troubled by their perceptions of how these workstations were utilized, challenging us to conduct a user survey to determine the validity of these perceptions. In this article, we will describe (1) how we conceived this new configuration and its impact, (2) modifications made, and (3) an analysis of the user survey.

Key Words:

• Reference
• e-mail
• Internet
• research
• public workstations
• scholar's workstations
• community users
• use patterns
• user surveys
• reference staffing
• Web filtering
• reference policies
• recreational use
• academic use
• undergraduate students