A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the referral log behind the Learning Commons' overflow desk increasingly used to flag repeat visitors rather than forecast capacity.
A term of coded referrals finds the quiet-corner desk's log tracking repeat visitors, not the capacity it was built to forecast
A name that turns up twice in the log tells duty staff something a capacity count never could, and by week twelve of the term, that was most of what the log was doing.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The overflow desk near the Learning Commons’ entrance has directed noisy laptop typists and phone callers away from the shared reading floor for longer than anyone currently staffing it can date. Its referral log was introduced alongside a capacity-planning brief, meant to tell Library Services when peak-period demand justified more desks like it. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities set out to check whether that brief still holds.
It mostly doesn’t. Coded against 187 log entries and interviews with nine duty staff across a twelve-week term, the capacity-overflow reason fell from 58% of entries in week one to 24% by week twelve, while an unlisted “repeat name” flag rose from 8% to 52% over the same stretch, overtaking every reason the intake form actually offers. Duty staff describe consulting the log to see whether a name has come up before, a use nowhere in its founding rationale.
Co-author Dr Lindiwe Achterberg placed the finding alongside the School’s wider interest in provisions that outlast the trial they were meant to end — pilots, she noted, rarely announce the moment they stop being pilots. The University counts the finding among the more useful corrections quietly emerging from its own record-keeping, and is treating the log’s next phase as an open question rather than a foregone reinstatement of its original brief.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.th7iml.