Editorial Themed Issue

Student engagement takes many forms varying somewhat, as this themed issue demonstrates, from country to country and culture to culture. In this editorial and in selecting papers for publication, the editors have focused on several key issues. The importance of engagement as an integral part of the learning process underlies much of the discussion. The role of students in their own learning and the need to acquire competencies is a shift in emphasis where libraries and library staff have a distinct contribution to make. Engagement is of mutual benefit as libraries embark on a constant cycle of evaluation and seek to establish strategies which are based on identified user needs. Both editors have a strong interest in library space planning where user participation has long been a topic of interest and this is reflected in the editorial and in several papers. Various institutional and methodological approaches are described combining to give an overview of the current state of play in this developing field.

Writing about student engagement in libraries may not seem very novel at first sight. Many articles and books have been being published on this topic over the last decade. Librarians all over the world have been developing projects and establishing routines for student engagement in their respective institutions. But despite its obvious popularity student engagement is still a developing trend without a fixed theoretical framework or methodology. Not even the terminology has been agreed on yet. As Appleton illustrates in his literature review for this issue, there is no accepted definition for student engagement in academic libraries but a diversified field of different applications, approaches, and methodology. The same is true for the intentions behind introducing or expanding student engagement in academic libraries. Many articles in this issue discuss the role of paying students as clients of higher education institutions and the goal of attracting new students to these institutions. Improving service and infrastructures to give more value for money and/or to become more competitive in the recruitment of new students are obviously main drivers for searching to involve students more deeply in development processes. But this is not happening only for economic reasons. Because there are no tuition fees in the public higher education sector and only a few large scale private institutions, German universities and colleges are less marketized and, in relation to acquiring new students, less competitive than is the case in the United Kingdom or the United States for example. This apparently results in slower development of student engagement in the different contexts. The articles in this issue from the US and the UK cover a wide range of projects involving students whereas the main areas of engagement in German academic libraries are currently space planning and IT-services. Therefore, the intention behind the respective projects is to learn more about students’ needs and requirements in order to deliver better services or design better spaces for learning. Several federal programmes, with the aim of enhancing the quality of learning and teaching in the higher education sector and lowering the number of dropouts, have unintentionally become a driver for student engagement in German academic libraries over the last decade. Librarians have been able to use the additional budgets available for new technologies and space refurbishment projects to involve students in the planning process.

However, student engagement is more than simply a marketing issue or a nice add-on to a development project. The very idea of learning as a self-organised process is deeply connected with questions of engagement and participation. This concept emphasises students as responsible actors within their own educational process and active partners of the different institutions on campus. Having the Humboldtian philosophy of education in mind, this does not sound very innovative but in fact, it is a radical change of perspective since it questions the traditional roles of teachers and institutions as providers of knowledge and students as recipients or – in an economic perspective – consumers. In this changing educational context, learning is more about acquiring competencies than about receiving knowledge or information. Self-organised collaborative learning, new forms of teaching, and the increasing digitalisation of learning and information resources are driving factors for this change. Certainly, there are still many institutional and individual barriers making changes in learning and teaching on campus difficult and slowing them down. Nevertheless, libraries should embrace the new roles as they have a vital interest in providing services of which students approve, and spaces that students want to occupy. This also means there is a need to develop and acquire competencies in collaboration with students and faculty. In mutual projects like some of the case studies referred to in this issue, libraries benefit from the information they gain by involving students, and students have the opportunity to acquire competencies that are not provided in theoretical courses. Against this backdrop, student engagement includes both taking students’ responsibility for their own education and learning seriously and taking the opportunity of learning from them about their individual needs and demands.

Furthermore, strategic development in libraries is becoming more and more iterative and agile, as it is no longer about reaching goals and immediately defining new ones but about thinking in cycles. The complexity of such processes demands the involvement of as many relevant parties as possible. In some cases, this may be researchers, as discussed in Dogunke’s article, but students, both in number and relevance, are the most important target group for the majority of academic libraries. If services and infrastructures are not finalised at some point but are under constant evaluation, it is crucial to have a set of strategies and methodology at hand. This may be a simple but effective toolbox-approach or, in a more sophisticated way, an innovation management plan helping the library to inform and organise its development processes. Both approaches may include groups of experts helping the library to continually develop. Again, there is the opportunity to engage with students as members of such groups. There are many fields of library work which can profit from student engagement – IT in particular has been developing user engagement for software development and relaunch management for example. Thinking in circles and constantly evaluating both processes and outcomes is strongly related to these initiatives from the computer industry. One of the methods originating in IT which has become popular in libraries and is referenced by several contributors to this issue, and indeed previous ones, is that of User Experience (UX) (Walton, 2015). UX uses ethnographic methods to obtain a richer understanding of user needs; such an approach is ‘a way of studying cultures through observation, participation and other qualitative techniques with a view to better understanding the subject’s point of view and experience of the world’ (Priestner, 2015).

Student engagement in library space planning is a special field of interest as space planning traditionally used to be an exclusively expert-driven process. To borrow unashamedly from Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a planner in possession of library spaces to design must be in want of engaged users. Indeed, public participation has long been part of the design process for architects and clients working on all building types and library planners and designers are no exception. The increasing trend towards participatory design was initially more common in public library design with the need to serve very diverse populations with specific needs. Universities and their libraries, however, have become increasingly focused on the student experience, the student as both client and product, and engagement as part of the learning process as the papers in this special issue evidence. As a result, participation in the planning of academic library spaces, whether it be a major new building or a rearrangement of existing spaces, is now accepted as an essential part of the planning process. In an age of electronic resources, academic libraries must be attractive and inspiring places where students want to come to imbibe and create knowledge and where they can work peacefully alone or cooperatively with others. It follows, therefore, that if library spaces are to be designed in a responsive way, users must be engaged in discussions from an early stage and throughout the project planning cycle.

There are many ways of doing this. Badia in the paper in this issue on data collection notes conducting surveys, focus groups, interviews, observation activities and statistical analysis as some of the most common tools used and there are a plethora of examples of these. As decision making develops from a top-down approach to one that is more participatory, ‘engagement of users in the design process tends to be seen as a positive input instead of an exhausting disturbance of a project’ (Meunier & Eigenbrodt, 2014). As an example of participatory planning, co-design, has been becoming exceedingly popular among urban planners and architects. Since is not a method or clear set of methods but an approach to involve citizens more deeply in open planning processes, it is easy to adapt even to small-scale projects if one is content to accept the philosophy of the citizen, or in the case of academic libraries the student, as an active partner within the planning and construction process. And engagement should continue beyond the opening of the new library space or building. Post-occupancy evaluation, involving in-depth dialogue with users, is invaluable as a tool for continuous improvement and for testing new concepts in practice. ‘Libraries exist in a constantly changing environment and library staff have always to be alert to the needs of users. Library building design exists in a constant cycle of change with the evaluation of completed projects leading to the planning of the next’ (Latimer, 2015).

It is through involving the community – and in higher education this means engaging students – that academic libraries will stay relevant and remain at the centre of university life. The different papers in this issue with their variety of case studies, theoretical and methodological approaches underline the assertion that there is an ongoing debate about student engagement. Obviously, there is not one definitive type or method of student engagement; rather student engagement is a highly individual process with specific institutional, cultural, and methodological contexts and is ultimately dependent on the goals and strategic purpose behind it. In some cases, academic libraries adapt forms of student engagement for single projects like a refurbishment or a relaunch. Other institutions implement student engagement in their innovation management or strategic planning. Whatever the underlying motivation, they need an informed theoretical context and a valid methodological basis for their work. The articles in this special issue contribute to both the debate within the academic library sector and the individual needs of librarians interested in or working with student engagement.

Olaf Eigenbrodt and Karen Latimer
Queen's University Belfast