When Maddie Howard heads to campus to study for her exams, she walks right past Kennedy Library and instead, heads toward the engineering buildings. After two-and-a-half years without a library, she adjusted to life without one.
“That’s the majority of my time at college,” Howard, a mechanical engineering senior, said. “It’s usually too many people. It’s loud, and I just would prefer to be in a different building.”
But for business administration sophomore Ava Parisi, other study spaces never sufficed.
“It’s nice having a lot more space,” Parisi said. “I used to study a lot in Baker, which is a great spot to study, but it is pretty busy a lot of the time.”
Since Kennedy Library opened in September, students have had to adjust to library culture for the first time in two years.
The learning curve has taken different forms.
In the past, students enforced the unspoken rule of “quiet floors,” according to Brett Bodemer, College of Liberal Arts librarian and department head for academic services. Noise levels should decrease as floors increase, but with the library closure, only current seniors have experienced this courtesy, and some students did not pick up on it.
“We didn’t communicate it well at first,” Bodemer said. “It was the students who put it in themselves as an expectation.”
Materials engineering senior Isabel Vargas noticed the change in dynamic immediately. At the start of fall quarter, she felt the noise levels were exactly the same on each floor.
“That’s probably because students don’t know about the library,” Vargas said. “Half of the whole school population haven’t had a library.”
Library employee and political science senior Lucia Moratinos-Chu noticed the same change.
“I can tell that some people don’t know that in the past, the fifth floor was just quiet,” Moratinos-Chu said. “Really, really quiet.”
Faculty rearranged furniture during winter break to promote the quiet levels, with more collaborative seating on the first and second floors and more independent seating on the third, fourth and fifth floors, Bodemer said.
They also added signage near the elevator to depict expected noise levels for each level.
Students have also experienced a change in the library’s 24-hour spaces since the reopening.
Prior to its closure, the library’s 24-hour space only included a small section of the first floor. Now, the 24-hour space includes the entire first and second floor, Bodemer said.
“I think it’s really nice to be able to have that because a lot of places in SLO are not open late enough,” Parisi said.
While sophomores, juniors and seniors debate the library’s quality, freshmen do not know any differently.
“I didn’t know what it felt like last year with no library,” said Jesse Mendez, computer science freshman. “But this is definitely a place I go to almost every day.”