Presentation and short talk for ALIA Sydney on 27 February 2012 about sustainability at UTS Library.
If you have Keynote, you can download this with the speaker's notes.
3. ETHOS:
sustainable
socially responsible & innovative
METHOD:
(co)design
TOOLS:
people
collections
technology
new building
IMAGE: From BikeTank at u.lab, 2011
4. THE TRIPLE
BOTTOM LINE IN
LIBRARIES:
social
responsibility
environment
finance
IMAGE:UTS Blake Library
The future UTS Library must serve as a hub for Knowledge, Collaboration & Culture in a redeveloped UTS City Campus.\nWe are planning to occupy that new building as a redeveloped organisation in 2017.\nMeeting that challenges and providing the services necessary to be such a hub means expanding our “spectrum” from where it is at present. Currently we are very dominant in the Knowledge area and we have some spaces and services that encourage collaboration, but we can improve and we’ve got a fair bit of ground to explore and cover with regard to Culture.\n\n
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There is s community expectation, a moral obligation and a financial imperative to be more sustainable than we are.\n
(Image taken by me in the ASRS of the University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City.) \nThe LRS will take away the ability to serendipitously browse the entire physical collection. It will, however, improve access to and delivery of those items stored in it. It also allows for a less cluttered and more spacious display of the most well-used books on open storage in our new Library, allowing for them to be found more easily.\nThe LRS is an investment in the Library space. It provides compact storage for much of the book collection and in doing so it saves investment in about five times as much traditional Library space that would need to be lit, heated, cooled, cleaned, etc. \nThus, it helps to UTS Environmentally Sustainable Development (EDS) Master Plan commitments to a 30% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020-21.\nWhat we need to do, however, to maximise our investment in such a facility is to encourage use of the materials stored within it.\n\n\n
At UTS Library we have a adopted a Sustainable Collection Model, which is described in detail by the former University Librarian, Dr Alex Byrne in Designing the Library of the Future (2010, p. 24-28). Essentially this is a concentric model with high use teacher-specified learning resources, both physical and digital, at its heart, extending to the wealth of information resources not owned or licensed by UTS Library, but to which the Library provides some pathways. It is considered a sustainable model as it recognises the financial, physical and ecological limits faced by an individual university library. No library can afford, financially or in staffing resources, the burden of purchasing or subscribing to an unlimited range of physical and digital content; it cannot continue to indefinitely add storage for physical collections at great financial and environmental costs; it cannot afford the costs to staff and clients of having large amounts of staffing resources occupied in manual collection description, management and circulation tasks, when there is a pressing need for new services adding value to our clients.\n
We have already made significant recent steps in our current building: replacement of older air conditioning, lifts, carpeting and lighting; the introduction of automated shut down on lights and computers outside operating hours; limited staff access to the building outside work hours to reduce building operating costs; ecologically friendly paper and double-siding as a default in all copiers and printers; and we’ve replaced all old toilet facilities with new facilities designed to EDS standards that eliminate waste and reduce pollution in terms of noise and cleaning requirements by design.\n\n\n
Currently we are running three staff-initiated in-house projects to raise awareness of sustainability, by starting small and thinking big. These all have potential to reduce waste and to lead to further staff-led initiatives in the Library. The exercise was facilitated and encouraged by Grant Young of Zumio http://zum.io/ \nKeep Ya Crap runs for a week and staff keep non-organic waste, targeting waste reduction. Waste is weighed and compared at the end of the week.\nThrough Lug-A-Mug we hope to reduce the waste from discarded brew cups & containers, with discounts arranged at many popular local cafes and from suppliers of re-usable cups. A score-sheet is provided so we can keep track of actual savings over the remainder of 2012.\nEcoboxes have been provided for staff to use in tea rooms when purchasing local take-away meals. Again, a score sheet is provided.\nVisibility of such programs is extremely important. This is a start for us and hopefully there will be a lot more to come that extends sustainability awareness within our community.\n\n
We run Earth Hour competitions and arranged guest speakers at our regular Talk It Up! Markets Forum talks (with topics such as “How are natural disasters, green building & UTS connected?”) to discuss what sustainability means, encouraging both staff and clients to come up with ideas to introduce sustainability initiatives. \n
(Images all taken by me in (L-R, top then bottom rows): British Library exhibition; Philological Library of the Free Uni, Berlin; Printing & media service TU Library, Berlin; Performance at Expanded Architecture, Carriage Works 2011; British Library; Performance at Expanded Architecture, Carriage Works 2011\n\nCodesigning our future library will deliver sustainable, socially responsible & innovative results in terms of our future programs, spaces, services, organisation, technologies and our relationships.\n