I’m watching people study & it’s weird.

More field notes from my ‘library escapades.’

For my media experiment this week, I decided to observe different floors at the library to see how they were used by students. I chose to examine students on floors 2, 6, and 7 because of the different rules these floors have in place.

The 2nd floor allows for conversational talking and besides the 1st floor, this is probably the most popular level. Students were seen using Mac computers as well as congregating in large ‘study’ groups (if you can call them that) near the Serials Department.

The 6th floor is an ‘absolutely quiet floor’ — although snoring is not uncommon. The computers on this floor have dividers which discourage more than one person sitting together and also eliminate one from feeling distracted.

The 7th floor allows for ‘some talking’ but during my field notes session I only heard one person yell - talk loudly - on the phone in the stacks.

This experiment was done on a Sunday at 1 pm and made me wonder how my observations would change if I repeated them at the same time on a different day, perhaps during the week when the library is busier.

**For privacy purposes, I only included pictures without the students I was observing; however, my field notes record where students were located and where I was sitting.