This campaign stems from the roots of an underlying frustration held by students relating to the quality of the Brynmor Jones Library. The story of this begins almost a year ago now. When I ran for the position of Vice-President Education, two of my key manifesto pledges were;
• Longer and more appropriate library hours.
• More and better library facilities.
The former of which has been achieved and the Library is now open longer than ever before. However, something I felt quite passionately about was that the ICT access within the Library was and still is very limited and that the library is both functionally and aesthetically becoming increasingly outdated.
Rather than recklessly campaign on this issue outright, something I learnt extremely quickly is that drastic institutional changes and decisions to invest significant capital expenditure from the University are not taken lightly, particularly in challenging times.
I decided to undergo a fairly comprehensive process of research and evidence gathering. This was primarily to get a much broader understanding of the various issues that students encounter with the Library but also to gain some tangible evidence to back up our argument and legitimise our campaign. The responses from the Education Survey and the Redbrick research have thus far given us a far clearer picture of what the key issues are with the Library and the student experience as a whole.
The Ideas Café in October and our Academic Council in December were used to unwrap some of those issues. Students were the focus here and they themselves came up with solutions to problems and gave recommendations as to how the Library can improve moving forwards. Engaging students in the process of the campaign is something that I feel is key to its strength.
We have also looked externally. We have made visits to the libraries at Sheffield University, Warwick University and also the newly developed Keith Donaldson library at the Scarborough campus. This gave us a really good understanding of what services and resources other institutions are able to offer their students and helped us to benchmark the Brynmor Jones in terms of competition.
On the 13th of February, I presented a session at the University of Hull’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. This was to showcase the findings of our research and to raise awareness to University staff and senior management that HUU has undertaken such a campaign. We will also be writing a committee paper in the coming weeks presenting our research and making various recommendations relating to the future of the Brynmor Jones Library.
Finally, we have created a video which illustrates our campaign. This is available online and is designed to show students what we are doing and what we hope to achieve.
Thanks for reading and I hope you can help to support the campaign.
Matthew Barrow – VP Education
Hull University Union.
M.Barrow@hull.ac.uk
