Findings

This section presents an honest representation of the author’s interpretation of the work of the staff of the Information Commons. It begins with a description of the salient features of the IC as they appeared to the author, and goes onto detail various observations that were made during the field work stage of this dissertation that were found to be relevant in the light of the theoretical literature. These observations are organised into categories that involve the actions of staff on the counter and then the actions of staff ‘off-counter’.

3.1 “…born out of completely fresh thinking…”

In April 2007 the Information Commons opened at Sheffield University. Intended as an undergraduate study facility, this £24M building contained 1300 study spaces, 550 PCs and around 100,000 books spread over seven floors. Intending to serve the needs of “the 21st Century student”, the IC was designed to contain “a whole range of study experiences within a single…building” (University of Sheffield, 2007). Thus, silent study areas are complimented by areas for more relaxed study; bookable group rooms co-exist with flexible study spaces containing moveable tables and screens; and RFID tagged books are managed by wholly self-service issue and return machines. Wire-less internet connection is available throughout the building, meaning that the café and the various sofa-areas are also capable of serving student’s study needs. The IC was the first addition to the University of Sheffield’s Library infrastructure in over 15 years and had taken over nine years to plan, design and build (Information Commons, 2007). As such, it was greatly anticipated and warmly received by the majority of the student body.



The fabric of the building is determinedly “future-proof” (University of Sheffield, 2007). The ecological impact of building is to be reduced by the use of movement sensitive shelf-lighting, self-regulating air conditioning, and a “grey water” system that recycles rain water for use in the toilettes. Students are encouraged to discard their rubbish in the clearly marked bins for paper, plastic or non-recyclable waste. Clad in “pre-patinated copper and grey terracotta” (Information Commons, 2007), the IC also boasts double-height, floor-to-ceiling windows, a series of ‘north-lights’ that let in large amounts of natural light all day but minimise solar glare, and soothing tones of off-white throughout. Each floor is highlighted with bright colours, and the IC’s promotional material is decorated with a diagonal band that echoes these colours. 24 hours a day and seven days a week, the IC is available exclusively to the students and staff of Sheffield University (others trying to get in are refused access), and the addition of this building on its “gateway site” beside one of Sheffield’s busiest arterial roads, is intended to give the University a service and an icon that is “the envy of its competitors” (University of Sheffield, 2007).

The University Library and CiCS jointly run all services in the IC. CiCS and the Library had worked together in the past, but mainly on short-term and small scale projects (Lewis and Sexton, 2000: 3). In anticipation of the joint running of the IC, all front-line Library staff and all front-line CiCS staff were given the opportunity to work in the front-line of the other department. All the IC jobs were advertised internally, except for the building manager’s job which was advertised nationally, and the Library Service and CiCS service managers’ jobs, which were offered to specific people.

The professionally choreographed branding and the image conscious design of the IC building also played a part in the selection of staff, and eight months prior to the opening of the building, a core of 16 people were appointed to work in the IC, seven of whom had worked for the Library previously, and nine of whom worked for CiCS previously. One Library person commented to me that: “I think they got the best people for those jobs…they only really wanted techie people…”. This assessment does seem fair, since all the Library people appointed to work in the IC are proficient and confident working with IT. It also struck me that they were younger than the majority of other front-line Library staff, suggesting that by accident or design, the staff would reflect the image of the building, and be more modern than the rest of the University’s library facilities. In order to further emphasise the unique qualities of the staff in the IC, fitted T-shirts in the bright colours of the floors and black fleeces with an embroidered IC badge were issued to staff, and they are obliged to wear some combination of these items when at work.

CiCS and Library staff share all front-line duties. These include customer service duties on the counter (called the ‘Help Desk’, “to avoid the old fashioned connotations of ‘Enquiry Desk’”, said one library person), ‘roving’ duties, and some off-counter duties specific to each person. The counter duties include library tasks such as issuing and discharging books; placing and satisfying reservations; and assisting students to find books and electronic resources. It is notable that there is no specified enquiry desk in the IC, and library people are not expected to give prolonged assistance to students in the traditional way: the senior library people commented that this was one of the reasons why “so many of us feel deskilled”. Tasks that would normally have been done exclusively by CiCS include assisting students who cannot connect to the wireless network; resolving problems to do with user accounts and passwords; enabling and unlocking print jobs; and resolving miscellaneous software problems.

Roving involves walking around the building in the distinctive IC staff T-shirts, and assisting students who ask for help; attending to problems that are pointed out by counter staff who stay in contact with the rovers by mobile phone; making sure that the printers and photocopiers are all well stocked with toner and paper; and shelving books. Many staff members hate the roving part of their job, with one CiCS person commenting to me that: “I’m not a librarian, so why should I have to shelve books?”, suggesting that many of the rovers’ intended duties are not enacted, a suggestion backed up by my observations in the IC – students approached the rovers rarely, meaning that most of their time was taken up with shelving.

Off-counter duties vary from person to person: one Library person works as the reservations co-ordinator, another is in charge of invoicing students for lost or stolen books, and another is in charge of logging the “comment, compliment, complaint” postcards that students are encouraged to fill in. The CiCS people have similarly diverse off-counter jobs, with one being in charge of programming and keeping up to date content on the information screens that can be found throughout the building, whilst another is in charge of fixing hardware problems found on PCs, and yet another is in charge of all staff PC problems and updates. However, it is important to note that, in fact, the majority of everyone’s time is spent in a directly customer serving environment, either on the counter or roving.

Occupancy statistics suggest that the IC is popular with students: it is regularly filled to capacity during term time. In fact, the volume of use that some of the services experienced following the first week of opening was so high that the Library had to appoint six more part-time shelvers, and second some members of counter staff from other library sites to work in the IC on a part-time basis.

3.2 The Help Desk: “…you won’t need to note this down…”

Work on the Help Desk is tiring and monotonous. It is intended that all CiCS and Library staff deal with any type of query. However, one CiCS person commented, “I pass all the book questions straight over to a Library person”, and this attitude did seem to be fairly common among the CiCS people. But, none of the Library people were keen to admit that they were not able to do the CiCS jobs, and would only ask for assistance from a CiCS person once they had attempted to help the user on their own.

It is common for students to come to the Help Desk with trouble connecting to the wireless network. On one occasion whilst I was observing, a student came to the Help Desk without a laptop, but wanting to know how to connect to the network. A CiCS person gave him the web page address with the instructions on and the student wrote this down. The CiCS person then said, “I’ll quickly run through the process on this computer to show you how simple it is”. The student was taking notes and trying to keep up, and the CiCS person kept saying “it’s all on the website, so you won’t need to note this down”. The CiCS person ran through the process very quickly, so quickly that the student was left not having gained anything from the demonstration that would have helped him connect to the wireless network later – the only useful thing that he took from the exchange was the web address. The CiCS person’s insistence on performing the demonstration appeared to serve the sole purpose of impressing upon anyone who was listening that the CiCS person was able to connect to the wireless network.

In contrast to this query handling example, a student approached a Library person and asked what time one of the other library sites was open until that evening. The Library person said he did not know but found the relevant library web page. He invited the student to come round the Help Desk and look at the web page, and then showed him how to get there from the library home page, and finally printed the relevant page off for the student. What is interesting about this example is not that the Library person’s assistance was more helpful to the student than the help that the CiCS person gave in the previous example (in fact, the student seemed a little annoyed that his simple query had provoked so long-winded a response from the Library person), but rather that the Library person seemed so keen to exhaustively disseminate what knowledge he had of the subject.

There is a notable symmetry between the differing ways that CiCS and Library people pass knowledge and information on to students and between the differing ways that they pass knowledge and information on to their colleagues. I asked the senior Library person “what do I do at the end of the day with the deposits people have left for booked rooms?” She said: “I made a crib sheet that was emailed round…I’ll print it off for you”. She then opened the email on her computer and took me through the process with the printed copy, and the email in front of us. I asked the same question of the senior CiCS person the next day and she said “you give the folder with deposits and U-cards to the porters”. This was a succinct, accurate summary of the information that the senior Library person had given to me the day before, but did not show me how I might find that information out again in the event of me forgetting, and seemed to preserve the CiCS person’s cache of unique knowledge: I only knew the bare minimum after this exchange, whereas I think that the Library person had given me all the information that there was on the subject.


Another striking example of how distinct the attitudes of CiCS people are to the attitudes of Library people in relation to disseminating information amongst colleagues occurred on the first morning of my observations. As is typical, one of the library co-ordinators was keen to fill me in on changes that had occurred since I had last worked. The self-service return machine had been freezing at often but arbitrary moments. The only way to resolve this problem was to re-start the PC that ran the self-return machine, which was housed in a cupboard underneath the RFID scanner. The Library co-ordinator took me through this process, and then showed me a crib-sheet that he had produced to make sure that I understood it. He said that this would be available behind the counter, and that he would email it to all staff. The crib-sheet involved eight stages and most of them were very trivial: “get the key marked ‘return machine’ from the key box in cupboard 5 behind the counter”; “from the start menu select ‘restart’ and then click ‘OK’”; “close and lock the cupboard and replace the key in the key box”. It seemed as though these instructions were intended for someone who had not only never worked in the building before, but who had also never used a PC before.

The striking depth that these crib sheets went in to relative to the complexity of the task they described, and the striking lengths to which the library co-ordinator went to guarantee that staff were aware of the task, is emphasised when juxtaposed with an exchange that occurred between me and a CiCS co-ordinator later that day. I asked the CiCS person if there were any crib-sheets for the most commonly occurring software problems that we would have to resolve and she said that “you won’t really need them…they’ll always be a CiCS person around for you to ask, and anyway, the problems are always so easy that it would be a waste of time to make up crib sheets for them”. I asked her what the most common problems were, and she said, “…mainly Word problems like setting up section breaks, using footnotes and sometimes Endnote…enabling more file store in users’ managed accounts…” Although a lot of these things are fairly trivial, all of them are as complicated, if not more complicated than the self-service machine restart that the library co-ordinator spent so much time detailing. These examples struck me as illustrating a fundamental difference between the way CiCS and Library people pass on knowledge to colleagues and users of the IC.


3.3 Off-Counter: “…I’m a Mac person...”

The staff area is separated from the Help Desk by a glass wall. There are 20 desks organised into facing rows with between two and six desks in each row. The building manager and the Library and CiCS seniors have desks in offices separated from the main staff area by other glass walls. Although not by design, the Library and CiCS people have separated and now sit in two distinct groups. Since the CiCS people need more space for PCs that need mending and other equipment that they are using, they have adopted the largest bank of desks. The library people need desks against which they can place book trolleys, and so they have adopted the bank of desks with the easiest access and surrounded by the most space. As well as sitting slightly apart, the Library and CiCS people also take their breaks in ways that reinforce the fact that they are different groups: the CiCS people invariably have cups of coffee and eat their lunch sitting at their desks, whilst the Library people will normally go to the staff room or go out for their breaks. However, although there are differences between the groups reflected in their working patterns, the atmosphere in the staff area is harmonious and on an individual level I saw no evidence of animosity between members of the two groups during my time observing.

CiCS people regularly tell jokes to one another that rely upon the computing strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues: “…don’t give that to him, he’ll code it in PHP…”; “...I hate Mondays, but he doesn’t because it lets him get back to re-imaging PCs…”; “…we’ll be here all night if he’s programming the printer queues…”. These jokes are not amusing but never fail to provoke knowing chuckles from the CiCS people. I also heard a CiCS person who did not work in the IC comment to one of the CiCS people who had been moved there, “…how’s the shelving going?”.

These jokes succeed in giving the impression that the CiCS people have a fairly advanced system of reputation ascription. This system is also evident in the actions of CiCS people when they are solving problems that their colleagues bring to them. I heard one CiCS person ask another to help him install some security updates on a Chinese format PC (requiring a high level of familiarity with Windows). The other CiCS person replied “…I’m a Mac person, so I’m not really the best person to ask about this”. This seems to show that the CiCS person is fully aware of his own strengths and weakness, and is not afraid of drawing his colleague’s attention to any weakness that he may have, because in doing so he also indicated that he had strengths in other areas. This recognition and then exhibition of talents for particular tasks is not something that happens amongst the Library people: there seems to be no desire to be thought of as someone who can do some tasks but cannot do others.

The way CiCS people talk about the organisation that they exist within is also strikingly different from the way that the Library people talk about the larger library. A CiCS person was complaining to me about his lack of ability to get his suggestions heard by the more senior people in CiCS, or to get any changes that he recommended enacted. He said “…its annoying that there are so many little kingdoms in CiCS”. This comment is significant because it demonstrates that even quite a junior member of the CiCS staff is interested enough in the organisation that he works for to come up with a description of it that reveals so much about the character of its structure. Although the phrase “little kingdoms” does indicate that the CiCS person perceives rivalries and petty jealousy in CiCS, it also carries the connotation of significant and clearly defined areas of jurisdiction that require defending, and are being defended successfully. The word ‘kingdom’ itself is laden with suggestions of grandeur, exclusivity and distinctiveness.

In contrast to this example of a CiCS person’s interpretation of their organisation, stands an exchange that I overheard between two library people. They were discussing whether or not a student who had not paid his accumulated fines all year would get them waived at the beginning of the following academic year (from September 2006, every student’s first fine was waived in a goodwill gesture by the library). One of the Library people commented, “…I bet nobody has thought of that”. This ended their discussion, and implied that they had very different conceptions of their organisation than the CiCS people had of their’s. The Library people appeared to not know, and not care who was in charge of this sort of policy refinement. They were also clearly of the opinion that the decision was nothing to do with them, and anyway that they didn’t really mind how the problem was resolved. In addition, it is clear from this comment that they do not think very highly of the library’s ability to think through this sort of practical decision. Thus, the Library people’s perception of their organisation is on the whole negative, whist the CiCS people’s perception of CiCS, although with an outwardly negative tinge to it, is in fact roundly positive.