Inclusive, Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Library Staff Spaces: Technical Services Return to Campus

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need to continuously reassess the way libraries deliver services and spaces to serve the needs of our communities. This need for assessment reaches into how we organize our staff spaces and teams within them. Remote work has become a feature of some positions within libraries; at the same time certain functions, some of which involve physical materials, must be carried out on site.

The opportunity to reassess spaces brings with it the opportunity to consider equity within staff workspaces particularly where needs may differ among employees, and where some work locations may offer different environmental benefits. These are opportunities to include colleagues at all levels in participatory decision-making about the arrangement and location of staff workstations and workflows through staff areas. This panel will explore the experience of a technical services unit within a university library. This group engaged in a series of experiments in the layout and location of staff workspaces with a goal of addressing workflow considerations, proximity to colleagues beyond technical services, and environmental benefits including increased exposure to natural light. In the process, the team confronted the need to assess tradeoffs -- on a limited budget no space is perfect. Several hypotheses about what would work best on paper were disproved through experimentation. The group also worked through an emerging situation where not every functional area needed the same thing. Perspectives from a diverse range of staff, librarians, and administrators will prepare participants to cultivate inclusive, evidence-based decision-making about staff workspaces in their libraries.