The problem

The main purpose of an academic library is to offer support for students and researchers, but the Tallinn University of Technology Library had a problem with constantly diminishing numbers of readers. The reason is that the way we study and work has drastically changed. Interdisciplinary teamwork is now a key part of studying and the need for the most up to date info has made the internet the primary source for information. The library has traditionally been the main place of work for students and faculty, but it has to undergo a drastic shift in how it fulfills it’s intended role.

The solution

STEM is a physical hub of learning that reaches out beyond its walls digitally, to provide support and guidance wherever it is required. It is a seamless part of studying in TalTech that is designed around the understanding that studying and work are done both digitally and physically at the same time.

The process

The project was carried out as part of Design Studio 3: Systems, a core subject of MSc Design and Technology Futures in a team of two students, in collaboration with Taavi Aher. The library of Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) approached the program with a request for cooperation as they wished to improve many aspects of their physical space and services. 

Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) is the only technological university in Estonia, providing higher education in engineering and technology, information technology, economics, science, and maritime. It has 11 000 students, 15% of whom are international students from over 100 different countries. There are a total of 86 study programmes, of which 32 are international. 
TalTech’s mission is to be a promoter of science, technology, and innovation, a leading provider of engineering and economic education in Estonia. The university cooperates with different companies to support organisational and product development and through this aims to provide opportunities for the students.

One of the main issues for TalTech library that the library management pointed out is that the library has diminishing amounts of visitors. They see this stemming from their facilities needing to be more visitor-friendly and aligned with visitors’ expectations. 

TalTech library also feels that the availability of e-resources means the students have less reason to visit the library. However, they note that currently, not many students are aware of the extent of the resources available. A vision for TalTech library for being a digital library currently lacks a concrete concept to carry itself.

To understand how to aid TalTech library to set a strategy for the future, our team of two students developed the design concept STEM based on research we conducted about TalTech library, the TalTech university campus student areas and changes in work and study. 

Digitalisation

Libraries are nowadays focusing more on digital resources, as the library users expect to have online access to materials. Modern research moves incredibly fast, thus having access to the newest, most trustworthy and reliable sources is vital, and this access has to be immediate. Furthermore, as a repository of knowledge, digital storage allows having more information available to the people seeking it than ever before. The services on offer by academic libraries are becoming more and more digital, with online research consultations available, for example.

Modern workspace

Academic libraries are changing to offer better spaces for students to work and study. Along with the traditional reading halls, libraries now offer media rooms, group workrooms, quiet individual study areas and spaces for workshops. Some academic libraries have gone even further to offer highly equipped studios for video and sound production and labs equipped with VR technologies and 3D printers. Some libraries have remodelled themselves as learning commons – learning spaces that share space for collaboration, content creation, meetings, socialisation, playing games and studying.

Navigating vast quantities of information

Since there is an overwhelming amount of information available, the quality of it becomes more critical. Libraries are developing tools, such as Altmetrics, to provide a better understanding of what are the best resources at hand. The consulting services are also under improvement to provide better guidance to students and faculty in their research.

Collection-centric to user-centric

There is a definite shift in how libraries think of their services, from a classic collection-centric approach, with the focus being on books, to a user-centric approach, meant to offer visitors personalised support and help. The idea is no longer to have a one-size-fits-all solution but to offer the available resources of the library in many different forms and on as many formats and devices as possible.

Cross-institution collaboration

Research and studying are becoming more and more a collaborative effort, with cross-institution projects growing in quantity. Academic libraries aim to facilitate this and enable multidisciplinary work by offering better workspaces and more complex and involved consultations.

The work involved applying co-design methods such as:

• Co-design workshops with students and library staff.

• Surveys, both online and in-person.

• Voting actions (to engage the student body in the discussion about the future of the library and to observe them interacting with these polling options).

Research Conclusions

Studying and work has changed

Multidisciplinary collaboration is the new norm

The way of studying and working has drastically changed and relies now in large part on multidisciplinary collaboration, often between people from different cultures. Students are assigned more and more group work to prepare them for the job market, where the expectation is collaborative and interdisciplinary work in activity-based offices.

Work needs to be supported by appropriate spaces

Students need spaces where they can freely discuss and align the team goals, work together and focus on a project or quickly meet to talk. These spaces need to feel like a natural part of their process and should be inviting. As groups have many different needs, finding a fitting space should also be facilitated by tools.

Only a few phases of group work are currently supported

At the moment, the university offers limited options for students working in a team, providing 8 group workspaces for 11 000 students. There are very few spaces supporting the new collaborative way of working of students, and thus the quality of the output of the university is restricted. The library offers 6 of the 8 group workrooms, but in general, the library only supports a few phases of group work, leaving significant gaps in fulfilling student needs.

The different phases of group work require high-level communication

Working in a group is a process that consists of different phases that contain collaboration with others and coordinated individual work, among others. Multidisciplinary collaboration relies the most on high-level communication, which is something that is best-facilitated face-to-face. With various obligations and different time schedules, there are not many opportunities for students to meet face-to-face, which is why students often resort to messaging apps. Messages are easy to ignore and hard to catch up with later and can cause the team members to slowly step away from the group work as they do not feel involved. TalTech community is very multicultural, making communication harder as it often requires crossing a cultural barrier.

The quality of individual work is reliant on the environment it is done in

Individual work also has changed, as it now requires students to work through many sources of information and analyse the findings. High levels of focus are needed. While the assumption is that individual work can be done at home on a bed, individual work benefits from having others around working at the same time. Home environment provides too many distractions and kills productivity, while a workspace designed for individual work, in the presence of others similarly working would be ideal.

The requirements for these spaces are diverse as individual work consists of many phases, and students’ preferences for the work environment can differ. The current individual work options on offer in the library and campus are not ideal.

The new way of working needs facilitation by experts

Students left to their own devices will run into issues difficult to solve on their own. There is a chance for the groups to fall into conflict, or the individual work not to get done. This requires the services on offer to evolve to fit the new needs. The library has to move beyond consultations about sources and offer new types of help. The role of the library changes in the dynamic of this new way of working.

Digital disruption in searching for information

Digital channels of information have disrupted physical ones

Digital channels provide information in a very accessible way and are always up-to-date with the latest resources and information. These are convenient to use as all it requires is access to the internet. The quantity of information available is immense.

The way students browse and process information has changed

Due to the abundance of information provided, students prefer to scan diagonally through as many sources as possible to find the most relevant content. The new generations might seem to have less focus. However, they are highly capable of working through this overabundance of information, merely needing tools that fit their intuitive ways of working.

Students prefer Google’s low barrier of entry

Consequently, the preferred way of acquiring information is through online searches using Google and other services, as these provide quick access to large amounts of information in an easily parsable way. Google offers the lowest barrier of entry to search large databases and displays results in a parsable manner compared to PRIMO or other tools on offer by the TalTech library.

Search engine results are biased, and high quality curated sources are needed

It is not widely registered that the information from Google is often unreliable. There is no curation, and the organisation of displayed results is affected by previous searches and paid advertisement, making the results biased. The search can only bring up information that is indexed for searching and accessible by Google, but much information on the internet is not indexed in this manner. A lot of these non-indexed sources are available through the TalTech library digital tools, but students do not fully utilise these as they are not aware of them, and the tools are unintuitive to use.

New tools are needed to cater to intuitive ways of working

The current TalTech library digital tools are ideal for classic researchers doing in-depth research. However, to cater to all students, from bachelor to doctorate and additionally, to the public outside the university, a new more intuitive tool enabling users to work through all the sources available to them (both physical and digital) and find the best materials is needed.

The STEM of TalTech

Based on the research, we developed a design concept for the library – STEM.

The name carries many meanings. STEM is an abbreviation for science, technology, engineering and mathematics - subjects forming the core of the studies at TalTech. Secondly, a stem is the structure which supports a plant and helps it reach towards the light, enabling it to grow and branch out leaves. Similarly, STEM brings together the core subjects and acts as a support structure that enables the creation of new knowledge in these fields.

STEM is a seamless part of studying in TalTech that is designed around the understanding that studying and work are done both digitally and physically at the same time. We need a physical space to study in, but the tools we use are often digital.

STEM is a shift in the role of a library that puts focus on enabling the creation of new knowledge by supporting the new ways of working and acquiring information that students and faculty have adopted.

• Supporting all phases of group and individual work

  The STEM physical space is a flexible activity-based work environment that provides solutions for the different focus levels and phases of individual and group work. It enables supporting activities such as computer use, one-on-one and group meetings, phone calls, relaxing, socialising and more.

• Automating book lending

  Two-thirds of the open stacks are moved into a book lending robot. This robot automates the book-lending process through a digital solution.

• Peer-to-peer learning

  STEM facilitates peer-to-peer learning through its fifth floor STEM Skills area. It enables students to share knowledge and specific skills by providing the space and digital tools to facilitate the process.

• New services

  STEM focuses on the facilitation of work, both individually and in a group. The services offered by STEM are a natural part of the workflow of students and faculty.

• New tool for acquiring information

  STEM Source enables quick and easy searching of all relevant information databases at once and allows the users to collect and share these materials in intuitive ways.

STEM environment

The STEM physical space (the current library building) is a flexible activity-based work environment. It provides solutions for the different focus levels and phases of individual and group work. It also enables supporting activities such as computer use, one-on-one and group meetings, phone calls, relaxing, socialising and more.

The floor plan of STEM holds different focus levels of individual and group work, with the deeper focus areas naturally falling towards the edges of the floor, leaving lower focus intermediate activities and services towards the centre. Spaces for supporting activities are spread throughout the floors to enable easy access to all users.

STEM opens up the space for work areas, as two-thirds of the open stacks are moved into a book lending robot. This robot automates the book-lending process through a digital solution and ensures that the books stay in pristine quality. Lending automation allows for more effective and controlled storage environment, fast user experience and reduces mundane jobs (like restacking shelves).

STEM facilitates peer-to-peer learning through larger workshop areas and computer workstations. It enables students to share knowledge and specific skills. Through peer-to-peer learning, students also learn useful soft skills such as public speaking and organising through the process. Through this facilitation, STEM connects the different institutions on campus and enables collaboration between students from different faculties, strengthening the academic culture of TalTech.

STEM as the
innovation hub of TalTech

TalTech prides itself on being an innovation hub and advertises itself as such. The library is in a unique position in TalTech, situated at the heart of the campus and being accessible to all, which enables to showcase the culture and essence of the university more prominently. In order to carry further the academic culture of TalTech, STEM would make use of the innovations of TalTech and showcase these with pride. Being a testing ground for innovations meant for public spaces, it can make use of the pioneering technology developed, influence the direction of technological developments and inspire students to develop their ideas towards tangible solutions.

STEM Source

STEM Source is a digital tool that gathers up the information available in different databases, including Google Search, and makes it accessible through a single search bar. It functions like Pinterest, but for research.

• Searching multiple databases at once

• Sharing research boards with others

• Saving search results to personal boards

• Easy browsing of different resources

• Source citing and text editing

• Search engine connected to the lending system for one-click book lending

STEM Skills digital

STEM Skills digital platform facilitates the peer-to-peer learning process, by providing a framework to organise and sign up for student-organised classes, greatly simplifying the process of finding and arranging classes.

It assists in organising peer to peer learning by connecting people who want to teach with requests from others looking to learn.

The digital solution of STEM can be accessed on desktop computers, laptops, tablets, mobile devices and through kiosks placed about the STEM building. The interfaces and options offered change depending on the device where it is used. The idea behind this is to adapt to user intention. People using the kiosks will be using these for specific tasks, but not for researching, users accessing STEM on their phones do not aim to read and comprehend complex papers, instead, use the device to navigate a space.

Wherever STEM is accessed digitally, the dashboard guides users to the function they are looking for. Dashboards differ between all the access points. On the kiosk, the highlighted function is the navigation aspect of it, other functions being secondary. The desktop and laptop version highlight tools, such as STEM Source and STEM Skills and the mobile version highlights the navigation aspect of STEM.

Comprehensive design report

Since the scope of the project was substantial, we compiled all of our work into a comprehensive report. This allowed us to provide the library with a clear understanding of their users’ needs and a strategy to move forward.

We designed the document to give a clear overview of all of the work done and the different aspects of the concept. The report includes all relevant research materials and conclusions, including our analysis of the academic culture of TalTech, the different environments of TalTech, all the interviews conducted and observations. The design concept section of the report covers all the physical and digital aspects of the STEM concept in depth. It includes comprehensive suggestions for all the different workspaces and supporting activities with lists of requirements and visual materials to guide the development of the library workspace. The placement of all these spaces are covered floor by floor using the TalTech Library floor plans as a basis, but the structure of the areas is designed in a universally applicable manner.