Regina Everitt: Let's start with your experience of using academic libraries.

Neil Everitt: As a mature student at Birkbeck, University of London, I used the library spaces as the transition from work to study, to take time to breathe, to catch up, before evening lectures. This (precious) 45 minutes or so, three times a week, gave me the opportunity to have some ‘me time’, important to an introvert, and replenish my energy reserves before the evening lectures.

The library also created a connection with the University ‘space’. This may have been replaced by other spaces such as the Students’ Union if I had been studying full time perhaps – but the library was an important element of how I remember my Birkbeck experience. Another major element of that experience was the support provided to utilise the resources available through the library and aid my transition into academic study.

Later, studying at Cranfield University, the space in and around the library was used to collaborate as part of small study teams, as part of a larger cohort of students, designed to replicate the way teams operate in organisations. The study teams provided support to their members by dividing the workload, and working together on projects and case studies, and created natural competition between the study teams. The teams were given free rein to utilise the variety of spaces available at the University, but speed was needed to bag the most appropriate space for the task, to avoid five tired and over-caffeinated individuals huddling around a single laptop screen as a spreadsheet was analysed or last-minute tweaks to a presentation were agreed.