Rob Green talks to UCL’s Ben Meunier about how a former Second World War bomb site provided the location for a new student centre that focuses on digital resources and learning space and redefines what the library is in the 21st century.

Later this year, UCL’s library service will open a new £80m student centre. The centre, located just behind to UCL’s main library, is the culmination of many years of planning that has seen one of UCL’s few brownfield sites redeveloped into a state-of-the-art resource for its 40,000 students.

The Gordon Street site has not had a properly defined role at UCL since the previous buildings were destroyed by bombs early in the Second World War. Portable buildings have been in place for much of that time, but there have been aspirations to properly incorporate it back into the UCL fold for a long time. In 1968, The Bloomsbury Theatre opened, but part of the bomb damaged site – known colloquially as the Beach Site – remained undeveloped, housing temporary buildings.

The desire to redevelop the site remained, and in 2004 extensive plans for cultural centre, including museum, were drawn up and very nearly got off the ground. Instead, the recession hit and the project was shelved.

Ben Meunier, Director of Operations at UCL’s Library Services, explains that a new strategic plan and leadership buy-in helped focus minds. UCL’s former President and Provost Michael Grant set the scheme in motion and his successor Michael Arthur identified the site’s potential as a method to improve student experience.

Student experience

Ben said: “He launched our current strategy, UCL 2034, that looks at a 20-year period and really focuses on creating positive student experience. It acknowledges that we have really strong research activity and strong partnerships with other organisations in London, particularly the NHS – but that our student experience had lagged behind that.

“The Beach Site was then earmarked for a new student centre as the place where UCL would demonstrate its comment and make a real statement about providing that excellent student experience.”

Ben points out that UCL has lagged behind its Russell Group peers in some respects, saying: ‘We have been struggling for quite a long time with the provision of learning space per student. For a time we were at about 12 students per study space, against an average of about eight student per study space in other Russell Group universities.

“We have been working with UCL estates to increase that, but anything we could do was never going to increase that number significantly.”

Study space

The shift from print to digital has helped the Library Services team to deliver more study space for students, with increasing amounts of printed material heading to UCL’s remote store. That has helped put the university at around the Russell Group average of one study space per eight students. The new student centre will reduce demand further, and leave UCL ahead of the Russell group average, with around one space per 7.4 students.

“The new student centre really enables us to make that leap from opportunistic adaptations to the campus to purpose-designed space,” says Ben.

Outstanding facilities

Having that strategic vision and commitment from UCL’s leadership has provided a clear vision of what the student centre should achieve. The Library Service Team’s challenge has been to implement the aims of the strategy through the new building and the services it offers.

Ben said: “The UCL 2034 Strategy talks about excellent support for our students and outstanding facilities for them. That is exactly what that new building will provide. With 1,000 new study spaces, that is one big contribution.

“The other big innovation for UCL is it will bring together various student-facing services. So we have a student-facing centre, a helpdesk for our student and registry service colleagues which will be a help point for students. With the new student centre, we will integrate that with ISD [the university’s IT team] support and library support.

“So we had this aspiration, which is now a plan, to provide all those services under one roof and in the same space within the service centre. We can provide learning spaces and also these integrated services for students and make it a base for them where they will feel welcome.”

Sense of community

However, the new centre is designed to deliver something that is harder to define and measure – a sense of community. Ben says: “One of the challenges with UCL is that with 40,000 students, we are a very big institution. There is a strong affiliation with their departments, a slightly less strong affiliation with their faculty and not a very strong historic relationship between the student and UCL as a whole. That is something that we are trying to build.

“This huge community of students and staff is an asset and a strength, but it is not one that is being exploited or managed – instead it has been much more local.”

Opportunity for library services

The Library Service began to tackle that issue with the creation of faculty hubs that were designed to break down barriers ­between departments. The first of those hubs was the Cruciform, aimed at the ­medical school and UCL Trust. That model has been used as inspiration for the ­student centre, but Ben Says the concept has evolved since the Cruciform opened.

The experience gained there demonstrated the library service’s ability to create and run spaces that would add value to the student experience. But as Ben recalls, the idea that the library service would run UCL hubs or even the new student centre was not always a certainty.

He said: “It wasn’t a given when the masterplan draft came out that the library service would run the hubs. There was a little bit of tension between what the masterplan architects were proposing and what library services saw as our remit beyond managing a declining print stock, declining loan numbers and spaces which at the time that were in a pretty poor condition.

“So at the time the masterplan came out, we saw our role as one of managing learning spaces across the whole of UCL and the masterplan gave us the ability to articulate that more clearly at an institutional level. We utilised that and turned it into an opportunity for library services, making a clear proposition to UCL that we had experience managing library services and that we had a clear vision of how we could use learning spaces and redefine what the library is in the 21st century.”

A new model

The popularity of the Cruciform hub and a later version for arts and humanities students showed that the library service could deliver a positive student experience. When the time came to deliver the new student centre, the library service was well-placed to take ownership.

Extensive research ahead of the opening of the Cruciform helped it to meet the needs of users – a lesson learned during the development of the student centre. Ben says: “The outcome was a real sense of satisfaction and that this type of space was what we as UCL wanted to offer. That set the bar for future learning spaces.

“It opened six months after Michael Arthur joined and when he opened it ­formally he explained that this would be the kind of space that we’d be offering in the new student centre. From the outset that was the model for the new student centre.”

That type of buy-in from an institution’s leader is incredibly valuable in terms of inspiring confidence, but it has to be earned. The success of the library service in both delivering successful work spaces as well as being able to communicate that success, was crucial.

People rather than stuff

For the library service, there are various metrics that are used to measure that success. The National Student Survey (NSS) is an obvious starting point for any academic library (a luxury other sectors cannot rely on), but the library service also conducts its own research. In the case of the student centre and other hubs, that research has informed design and service delivery. Future NSS surveys and ongoing feedback will continue to inform and shape the way the student centre develops.

The decision to deliver a centre that is focused on digital resources and space, rather than print resources is largely down to that feedback and recent trends. The Cruciform provided a reduced level of physical resources in favour of more space, and that was met with a positive reaction from users.

“From the outset, the emphasis was about making this building about people, rather than stuff,” says Ben. “It was an easy decision to not have print in the student centre. We have been very focused in developing the digital library and our digital services to students. We have also done a lot to focus on customer service and self-service through RFID. So the reliance on the library as a manager of transactions has fallen down the ­hierarchy of our role.”

Supporting students

“Where we see our role being now is supporting students in their learning and managing those student spaces. Many of our library assistants are spending less time on circulation matters and more time on supporting students with enquiries and accessing resources such as journals.”

As part of that improved management of spaces, library assistants (LAs) are trained to deal with common IT issues – including the 10 most common queries. Even if they cannot help directly they are able to log problems with the IT team and signpost students to the best source of help. Something that has worked well before at the Cruciform student centre, not least because LAs are still working after the IT desk has finished for the night.

This role supplements their core job of assisting students with information needs – accessing resources or moving more advanced needs to inquiry specialists or subject liaison librarians.

Observation

Although this way of working is increasingly common at UCL’s libraries, it will still be monitored and from the outset there will be a heavy focus on observation in the new building (a subject covered by Andy Priestner in IP March 2018 pp. 40-41). Ben and the library team are keen to know how the library is actually being used and are willing to change things if needed.

Ben says: “We will have a centre manager who will be able to oversee the activity and they will be able to steer where we identify needs and look at ­student behaviour and adapt accordingly.”

And while the building is aimed squarely at UCL’s buildings, there is an ambition that it will create a closer link with Bloomsbury and the communities around UCL. Alumni Rachel Whiteread has been commissioned to create a work of art for the main lobby, which will be open to the public. Art and exhibitions celebrating UCL’s research will also feature, as both a showcase and to inspire others.

Walking the green talk

As with any large building project, there is a cost and it is not just financial. However, UCL has seen the student centre as an ­opportunity to aim for the greenest accreditation from Bream, which looks at both how the centre is built and its ­ongoing ­running. As such, the student centre features solar panels, two bore holes for heating and cooling, and a roof garden.

“Its about being able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk – bearing in mind we have some the leading figures in intelligent, sustainable buildings at UCL,” says Ben. “We have this research and we want to be able to demonstrate that in practice on our own campus in Bloomsbury. With the new student centre, we are really trying to push what we can do in terms of sustainability.”

The Student Centre in numbers

• Student study spaces: 1,000
• Computers to be available to students: 300
• Hours a day the building will be open for use: 24
• Floors above ground: 5
• Floors below ground: 2
• Area covered by photovoltaic (solar) panels: 200 sqm
• Internal floor area: 5,840 sqm
• Depth of two boreholes regulating the building’s temperature: 110 metres
• Years the site has been vacant for (except for occasional use as ­temporary accommodation): 75