The academic library as congenial space: more on the Saint Mary's experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose To provide theoretical and practical perspectives on the “library as space” debate as well as an update of an earlier (2002) New Library World article on one university library's attempt to re‐position itself through physical change. Design/methodology/approach The first part examines the need to fashion academic libraries as desirable destinations for students in the face of the 24/7 availability of both library and non‐library electronic sources of information. The second part provides an account of some of the latest initiatives undertaken by the library at Saint Mary's University, an urban, primarily undergraduate university of 8,000 students on Canada's east coast. Findings The critical importance of providing a comfortable and stimulating environment for students and the rewards for doing so are confirmed, with reference to various Canadian and US schools. Some of the almost‐universal characteristics of today's students are identified within the context of the changing nature of academic research and communication. Practical implications It offers advice and insights to libraries striving to strengthen their place within the academic life and social environment of the university. It also provides arguments for and encouragement to those attempting to implement innovative changes to either library space or library policies. Originality/value Brings together many of the ideas and experiences of disparate academic libraries facing similar challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".