The Top 5 Mistakes Renovating Your Library — And How to Avoid Them
You’ve been staring at the same frayed carpet tiles for 1000 years. The six person wooden tables never see more than two patrons. An hour in any chair in your library guarantees a chiropractic visit. Some corners of your library are as desolate as the Sargasso Sea.
It’s time to renovate.
Some directors seek out this challenge — others dread the prospect. Either way, it’s a unique chance to overhaul aging space and have a long-lasting impact on the community. It is also a chance to show your competence and supercharge your career. Unless it all goes sideways.
When this opportunity becomes a trap, it’s bad for everyone involved. The three of us have collectively worked on over 350 design projects. We challenged ourselves to each come up with a list of the three biggest mistakes we’d seen in planning for and executing a renovation. Then we combined our lists and chose the five most common and correctable mistakes. From the perspective of a library director, a space planner and an architect, here are the five biggest mistakes renovating a library — and how you can avoid them:
Mistake #1 — Not building the right team
A renovation can fail before a line is drawn on a floorplan or a single carpet tile is removed. Renovating a library is often a multiyear project and the most expensive task you’ll take on for that library. Building the right team is critical. Here are four steps you can take to build a strong team:
1) Share a vision — A vision is conceptual agreement on the problems the renovation must solve, the process the library will use for design and how a design team will collaborate. The vision should flow out of preparatory work: patron research, a space audit, staff input, stakeholder conversations and the strategic planning process. If you bring in a space planner or hire a retired librarian as a consultant, they must buy into this vision, persuade you of any issues they identify, and strengthen this vision with a zone plan for your renovated space. When architects and interior designers are hired, it’s critical that they also share this vision.
2) Be Open to Ideas — on a strong team, ideas can come from anywhere. If any team member — from an architect, designer or engineer to a consultant, planner or the library director herself — is not open to good ideas from any source, the team will be weaker.
3) Cover Your Bases — A successful renovation involves more than floorplans and construction documents. You need to research community needs and gather input from your patrons. Engage with the leaders of marginalized communities early on. Careful coordination with municipalities and strong communication with the community is vital. Get the staff on board with the vision early in the process.
4) Plan for Continuity — The vision for a space can be killed by those who do not understand it. Seemingly small changes — like moving a shelf, replacing a chair or removing a table — can have multiple unintended consequences: from changing pathways to compromising the effectiveness of zones or even depressing circulation performance. The best way to guard against these concerns is to maintain a core team from early in the project to the end. The core members — the Library Director and/or staff, a planner or consultant, architects and any research, analytic, PR or fundraising members on the team should stay engaged from project inception (at least at the master plan stage if not during the space audit) to opening of the new space.
BONUS — 3 Red Flags in Prospective Team Members:
1) Anticipatory Geniuses — Design team members who claim to have ‘solved’ the floorplan before even interviewing the staff or doing a detailed walkthrough with the director. Don’t create a selection process for your architects that requires or encourages this.
2) Tried and True: Any designer whose renovation projects all look the same. One size does not fit all.
3) Arrogance: Designers who ignore staff input and don’t want a librarian on the core design team. Librarians who assume the research and expertise from other industries and experts isn’t applicable to their project. Donors, mayors, provosts, architects, who are interested in creating a monument to themselves.
Mistake #2 — Not Designing for the Missing Patron
Research is part of the design process. While you’re busy with responsive research — online surveys, focus groups and community input sessions — you will hear lots from the core users of your library. That doesn’t mean you’ll learn everything about what the community needs. Responsive research is good at engaging core library users with the design process. It may, however, miss other important actual and prospective patrons.
The world has changed since March 2020 and your community has undoubtedly changed since the last renovation of your library. That means there are people in your community with needs that the last renovation didn’t address. Here is how to find them:
1) Don’t Start with Comparative Statistics — An easy way to evaluate your library space is to measure your collection size, seating and program of spaces against averages for your community size or peer libraries. Don’t start with this exercise. You’ll be comparing yourself to a wide hodgepodge of communities with different mixes of patron types and designs. Start by analyzing your existing space and the needs of your patrons.
2) Engage Directly with Marginalized Communities — The leaders of these communities are often active in civic, municipal and nonprofit organizations. They represent the people you’re least likely to hear from in your responsive research. Don’t expect them to come to you on their own. Seek them out. Listening to them can lead to surprising insights. In Pima County Arizona, this process led to the establishment of the library nurse program that puts RNs into the library branches to conduct blood pressure screenings, health assessments and case management for at-risk communities.
Working with a tribe in Utah and researchers at Utah State University, we recognized that a break in the traditional food rituals of the community had resulted in obesity and high diabetes rates among children. Putting a teaching kitchen into the tribal library was a critical step to meeting their needs.
In Stamford, Connecticut, community leaders identified the importance of hoteling spaces in the main library and branches (spaces for governmental agencies and non-profits to confidentially meet with clients in the library) to improve their coverage and service delivery.
3) Experiment Before You Build — One of the most powerful tools in a renovation can be changing the paradigms of what a library represents for your patrons. As new furniture, fixture and work surface concepts migrate from retail stores, offices and classrooms to libraries, they can give patrons better ways to explore knowledge, to work, create and study. Embrace experimentation by adding some of these new items to the library during the design process. These experiments will help you harvest valuable insights from your community before you renovate.
Mistake #3 — Not analyzing your current space
Even if you are demolishing your current library, you can learn a huge amount from your existing building. Understanding what’s working and not working in the layout of your current space will help you avoid making the same mistakes in a redesign. Beyond interviewing staff, observing patrons and looking at new trends in library design, there are tools that you can borrow from the private sector to analyze your space.
Though it may sound counter-intuitive, libraries face many of the same challenges as retail stores, and their audiences overlap. Retailers want customers to navigate their space intuitively. They need patrons to grab items off the shelf and bring them to checkout. And they must make sure that all the parts of their store are useful throughout the day. This is a special challenge for restaurants, who have pioneered the second analytic technique described below. Here are the two ways to analyze your current space as practiced in retail stores and restaurants:
- Heat-Mapping & Circulation Efficiency Analysis — Retailers use heat maps to understand customer movements around the store. They also use point of sale technology (some with the assistance of Nielsen and other analytic companies) to understand where items that are purchased are picked up and whether they were on display. Libraries can unlock some of the same insights with ILS data. Breaking down the circulation for different Dewey ranges and then mapping it onto the precise location that the circulation occurs gives us a picture of where the collection circulates. When libraries are able to separate the circulation that occurs from tall shelving from the impulse-checkouts that come from displays (usually by creating displays as distinct locations in an ILS system) and then normalize this data into circs-per-square-foot over a 6-week period, a clearer picture emerges. This data will help with two different kids of insights. First, it will tell you how efficient tall stacks circulate books (or movies, etc.) versus well-merchandised displays. Secondly, it helps show the effectiveness of a library’s pathways and highlight dead zones.
You may be surprised when you see these numbers! The data will lead you to increase the number of displays in a renovation, as increasing your circulation will allow you to store more of your collection in patrons’ homes and less of it on shelves in your library. This data will also help determine the ideal mix of display and shelf storage for collection items and for locating pathways to activate dead zones.
2. Daypart Analysis — An invaluable analytic tool from restaurants is to look at how a space performs at different times of day and different days of the week (or when school is not in session). For libraries with limited space, the idea of allowing a zone to be used for only two or three hours a day is difficult to accept. A daypart analysis can be a key tool in identifying zone conflicts such as teenagers and adults in the same zone with different activity levels in the after-school time period. These zone conflicts can then be addressed in the planning process.
Mistake #4 — Not staying engaged
One of the most exciting moments in a renovation project occurs the first time the design team unveils 3-D images of a new space. It’s easy to imagine that this could be the end of the library staff’s intensive engagement, because sharing a vision with design professionals means that everything will work out according to that vision.
This is not true. Each team member — including librarians — must be custodians for safekeeping the part of the plan in which they have unique expertise. As a plan becomes more detailed, the overall vision can be compromised in hundreds of mundane ways if all the team members are not paying attention. In construction in particular, there are always surprises. Sometimes the library staff will be the only ones to see where a change requested by another team member will create real problems for the professionals working in the building down the line. Here are four tips for staying engaged:
1) Remember that a Floorplan is Not a Building — When a library director sees a problem and imagines a solution, it may turn out to create other problems. When a space planner creates a zone plan for the library, they may not account for mechanical issues with the building. When an interior designer creates a floorplan, it may create a sightline issue for library staff. When an architect drafts construction documents, small changes in furniture placement may compromise the zone plan. And when the building is constructed, something in the walls, floors or inattention to the plan can introduce other problems. Don’t assume the vision is complete until the project is done.
2) Include Advocates for the Staff and for Patrons — Both groups are an important part of the early process, but a thousand decisions down the line can compromise sightlines and working conditions for staff or usability for patrons. Make sure you include the director or a library staffer as well as a separate expert in patron needs on your design team through the end of the project.
3) Learn how to say NO — The library is the final voice on all construction decisions. Builders and other members of the design team may be willing to accept some shortcuts to save time or money, or may have ideas that simply won’t work for your space or community. The library director needs to learn when to say “NO”, to whom they can effectively say it, and how to ensure that a “NO” changes the path forward.
4) Demand what you paid for — If a building detail is not finished correctly, don’t be afraid to press the architect, the owner’s representative or the construction manager to force the contractor to get it right. It is possible to be both firm and polite and still get what you paid for.
This does not mean seeking unnecessary confrontation or demanding something you did not pay for. It is critical to lay out the ground rules for communicating with the construction team during the construction phase. There is a fine line that separates the assertive library director from an overbearing one who oversteps bounds. Respect the communication channels and expect to be respected as the final decision maker. Make decisions that make long term success and do not fall victim to the false pressure of expedience or convenience.
Mistake #5 — Ignoring the politics
A successful renovation involves numerous acts of coordination and persuasion on an organizational or municipal level. This is a good working definition for politics. It’s best to recognize the inherent political nature of a renovation process from the start and plan with your eyes open. Here are some tips for success:
1) Understand your funders — if you have all the funds for your renovation in your reserve fund at the beginning of the project — congratulations! But make sure that anyone who has to sign off on employing those funds is on board with your vision — whether that’s a library board or a municipality. And remember that even if you already have your funding secured, your community will rightfully feel ownership of your library and those funds. While you can’t please everyone, focus on transforming any defensiveness to ownership of the exciting changes to come.
If you are floating a bond or engaging with a municipality for funding, make sure you understand the process, who your supporters are and those who might not share your vision. For each person or group who you need to approve or support your funding request consider:
a) What is their win structure (how does the renovation advance or hinder their interests)?
b) Whose feedback do they trust (i.e. who do you need to persuade to sway their vote)?
c) What are their taboos (are there any things you can do that will put them into ‘over my dead body’ opposition)?
2) Engage the Staff — Don’t underestimate the ability of your staff to undermine a renovation. Make sure there are some visible ‘wins’ for them. Involve them in the process so they feel ownership of the new space.
3) Don’t Ignore People Who Dislike Change — this is an identifiable group in every renovation project. Consider designing a traditional space for them to pull them onto your side — even if it’s a single room!
4) Identify the Saboteurs — Consider who might have a personal interest or ability in sabotaging the project and proceed as if they’re going to do exactly that. If you cannot defuse them, then make sure you isolate them by anticipating their moves and working directly with folks they might turn to for support. Where might you be vulnerable to criticism or attack? Spend some time doing a renovation-specific SWOT analysis to find weak spots and preempt potential problems.
5) Keep Selling Past the Open — As a director, you job isn’t done when the new space opens. Even if you create a transformative space that most of the community celebrates, some people won’t like it. Instead of ignoring them, keep the conversation going. Continue to solicit feedback from staff, patrons and stakeholders as the new space becomes operational. Expect to make changes and make sure you’ve designed flexibility into your new library. A library and its community constantly change, so the process of evaluating and adjusting the space never ends.
Thanks for reading! This is not a definitive list, but we hope it will help you start thinking about the process of your renovation. If you have helpful stories, or other mistakes to add to our list, please let us know!
David Vinjamuri is Associate Professor (adj.) at New York University and runs ThirdWay Space. He is author of Library Space Planning: A PLA Guide (ALA, 2019). Contact: davidv@thirdwayspace.com
Joe Huberty is Principal Architect with Engberg Anderson Architects. He has spent over thirty years designing and building libraries and other public buildings and has a passion for creating great spaces for people. Contact: joeh@engberganderson.com
Julie Retherford is Director of the Chetco Community Public Library in Brookings, Oregon and previously worked in libraries in Ohio. She recently finished a two-year library renovation and learned a few things. Contact: Julie@chetcolibrary.org
