A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities audits how many times the Library's "interim" equipment-loan sign-off desk has had its review date extended since replacing a disputed self-service kiosk, and finds the extensions keep coming long after the dispute rate that justified them fell away.
The Library's staffed equipment sign-off desk cut return-condition disputes within a term; its review date has still been extended seven times since
Slop University’s Library replaced a disputed self-service equipment-return kiosk with a staffed sign-off desk in March 2024, filed as an interim measure pending a formal service review. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asks what “pending” has actually meant since.
An extension memo that repeats the last one word for word isn’t hiding anything. It’s just telling you which sentence the institution has decided is finished with revision.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Anouk Mensah and Dr Marek Solheim set seven extension memos and 22 months of Library Services Committee minutes against the desk’s own return-condition dispute log, tracking the figure the review was supposed to be waiting on. Monthly disputes fell from a kiosk-era mean of 13.4 to 2.1 within the desk’s first quarter and have not climbed back since, while the “interim” classification has outlived that recovery seven extensions over.
“A determination closes an agenda item; an extension just carries it to the next one,” said Dr Solheim, whose own research follows initiatives an institution never quite gets around to ending. “The desk stopped being a question a long time before the paperwork did.”
The finding does not recommend the arrangement be made permanent, or wound back — only that the University say, in writing, which one it currently is. The work reflects a continuing interest across the School of Emergent Priorities in the distance between what an institution decides and what it merely keeps deciding to decide later.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hvbncw.