Shhhhhhh.
Don’t tell any traditional librarians, but libraries are on the verge of a renaissance.
The concept is no longer built around shelves and shelves of books. Rather it’s about facilitating collaboration and learning from digital resources.
Misericordia University in Northeast Pennsylvania is an example of a small school that’s rethinking its library space.
“We recognize that the student walking through the door today has grown up with laptops, cell phones [and] smartphones,” says Mark Stull, serials and electronic management for Misericordia’s library.
The school ended up partnering with T1V to deploy eight 55-inch Interactive Walls running ThinkHub collaboration software throughout the group study rooms of its campus library.
The new solution, Stull says, “allows students to collaborate, create, have conversation, discuss, debate their projects, their papers, their presentations.”
More from T1V’s Press Release:
Misericordia University is a liberal arts and pre-professional studies university located in northeast Pennsylvania, enrolling more than 3,000 full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate students. The University partnered with T1V to deploy eight 55″ Interactive Walls running ThinkHub collaboration software throughout the group study rooms of its campus library.
Misericordia’s library leadership recognized that the student walking through the door today has grown up with laptops, smartphones, and devices that expose them to information 24/7 – their expectations of technology were not being met by the current library offering. So the Misericordia team began to rethink the square footage of the library, repurposing space to accommodate less books, and more room for group study.
It was at this stage that the team discovered T1V’s ThinkHub collaboration technology as a solution to redesigning the Misericordia library to more closely align with students’ expectations and work habits.
ThinkHub is a software-based solution that replaces much of the hardware that we associate collaboration systems with today, and supports unlimited BYOD (bring your own device) connectivity across Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android platforms.So no matter what type of device, platform, or program students are using to conduct their studies, they can share their content and devices to the ThinkHub Canvas wirelessly to annotate, edit, and collaborate with their fellow team members. When they are done with their ThinkHub session, students can then email or save the ThinkHub Canvas, or resume that same session at a later date.
Jenn Luksa, Misericordia Library Director, says “[ThinkHub] has changed the space of the library dramatically…each of the individual study rooms has ThinkHub technology, so [students] can share ideas not just on a whiteboard, but on an interactive screen.”
“ThinkHub allows students to collaborate, create, have conversation, discuss, debate their projects, their presentations…”, says Mark Stull, Serials and Electronic Management at Misericordia University. He continues, “T1V has allowed/enhanced our ability, or the students’ ability, to reach those goals. We hope this is just the beginning of T1V on this campus, the possibilities are endless…”
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