TecHub boosting library use at Providence College

TECH SUPPORT: Donald R. Bailey, left, director of Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College, and John Sweeney, senior vice president and chief financial officer at PC, in the library’s TecHub. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
TECH SUPPORT: Donald R. Bailey, left, director of Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College, and John Sweeney, senior vice president and chief financial officer at PC, in the library’s TecHub. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

For years Providence College students had been congregating on the lowest floor of the school’s Phillips Memorial Library largely to work on group projects in a less structured – and less quiet – setting than the library’s other rooms.
But the study lounge was drastically outdated, having been kept mostly as it was when the library opened in 1970 and void of any updated technical equipment. The students also weren’t getting the staff assistance and tech support they needed while working there, due to their tendency to study long past the hours of administrative services.
The school’s response is its award-winning TecHub that, according to those running it, is a natural blend of services brought on by the need to best serve students.
“The traditional role of the library is changing and the blurring between academic computing and administrative computing is going away,” said John Sweeney, senior vice president for finance and business at Providence College. “This was a way in which IT and the library could better serve our students in a schedule and place that students felt comfortable working with.”
When Sweeney came to Providence College in the spring of 2010, some of his staff and library staff had been in discussions, through the academic-affairs department, about how they could work more closely together.
By summer the departments had identified the transformation of the library study lounge as the best way to collaborate and move forward to best benefit students, faculty and staff.
The idea was to renovate the bottom floor space, relocate the library help desk there and co-staff it with library and IT personnel, including the library help desk, so that students and other users could receive both research and technical help when needed.
“We decided to build walkways where people walk,” said Russ Bailey, director of the Phillips Memorial Library. “The students and faculty would very often have questions and need help and they wouldn’t know where to go or what to ask or the places they normally would go were closed. That’s how we decided to build it.”
Besides being able to utilize a space already well-regarded as a go-to academic gathering spot, putting the TecHub at the library was the best choice, Bailey said, because the building is open for more hours than any other on campus, from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. “It’s the largest, most robust technology lab on campus so we simply combined those two areas and tried to integrate them,” Bailey said. “It was [building] an area of knowledge for teaching, learning and researching, and of high technology and digital tools in a way, in a place and at a time when patrons needed and wanted and asked for it.”
The TecHub opened in December 2010 after several months of renovations, including installing new flooring and lighting, some painting, bringing in furniture, and of course, the technical equipment.
The TecHub is outfitted with four Macmini [double boot] computer terminals, two collaboration tables that each has a Macmini computer, a wall-mounted, flat-screen monitor that allows for projecting images from a laptop, and multi-group collaboration tables.
The library help desk was relocated and dubbed the TecStation. The project cost approximately $133,000 and was financed through the college’s depreciation resources.
The entire area accommodates some 75 people.
“It’s been extraordinarily successful,” Sweeney said. “In this day and age, you don’t need face-to-face contact but I think people still seek it out a little bit.”
With the old set up, the study lounge drew 305 students per average week. Today it draws some 1,290 average visitors, a figure that, when taken on a semester basis, means visitation has quadrupled.
In June 2012, Providence College was selected as one of three winners of the National Association of College and University Business Officers Innovation Award for its TecHub and TecStation.
The center now is building iHelp, a collection of, said Bailey, “interactive, dynamic” websites that will be maintained by the TecHub staff who run the center daily until midnight.
Those hours may be the next co-department innovation.
“The one complaint we have is that students want it open 24-7,” Sweeney said. •

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