As I grow ever more cynical with age, I have come to realise that there are two sorts of innovation: one where someone really discovers something new that changes the way other people look at the world, and the other where someone patents a “circular transportation unit support module” and hopes that no‐one will notice that it is really just the same old wheel. I am sorry to say, in spite of all the excitement which Ms Schader and her contributors express, that I would put “learning commons” mainly in the latter category. In the dim and distant past, when the Institute of Psychiatry building was first being planned, Sir Aubrey Lewis (the doyen of British psychiatry) said that “the library and the canteen should be together in the middle of the site because they form the core resources for academic collaboration”. Ever since then one of the main assets of the institute has been having one of the world's largest libraries in the field located close to a common room which has been one of the few places in the world where psychotherapists casually converse with neurochemists. The inventors of “learning commons” have discovered the astounding new fact that students learn things outside the lecture hall by reading about them and talking to each‐other about them.
It is unfortunate that the word “library” has acquired such boring connotations that people are over‐keen to find new labels. When I retired as “librarian” I was replaced by a “Director of knowledge management”. Princess Anne won my unlikely allegiance several years ago when she was being taken around King's College London [an institution which has always reminded me of a would‐be trendy vicar squeezing himself into a pair of flared trousers just as everyone else has moved on to skinny jeans]. They proudly showed her a new “Learning Resources Centre” and she asked rather tartly “what happens if people ask the way to the library?”
I was actually rather disappointed with this book because it seems to me to over‐emphasise bricks and mortar. There has been an extraordinary revolution in information work since I trained as a librarian, but this revolution does not necessarily involve buildings. The astonishing innovation has been that students no longer have to be physically in the library in order to use information sources, and do not have to be in the same room in order to bounce ideas off each‐other. The university for the FaceBook/Blackberry generation will ultimately have to be far more different than just adding WiFi points and small group discussion areas to a basically mediaeval library concept and putting networked PCs onto every available flat surface. The slightly dated, late twentieth century, impression is added to by the cramped black‐and‐white photographs scattered through the book, mostly showing clean cheerful‐looking students sitting at rows of bulky PCs. In fact, when I first opened the book at random on p.149 – “View of the Lecture Room from the Student Desk Perspective” I assumed incorrectly that this was the “before” picture, and that “after the exciting new redesign” would be on the next page.
What we have here then is descriptions of the planning and design that have gone into ten newish university libraries, one each from Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, and the rest from North America. In the unlikely event that anyone anywhere in the world is planning a new university library and had not intended to incorporate IT services, media support units and facilities for student inter‐action, then there are object lessons to be learned here. Otherwise this book seems to my jaded eye to be so representative of current mainstream thinking that I found it hard to share Ms Schader's excitement. If you like reading descriptions of other people's libraries you may find this book worth looking through, and you may pick up some useful ideas. This is a worthy and solid descriptive collection, but it is by no means the blueprint for the twenty‐first century information service that I had hoped for.
