A new Slop University research poster interviews volunteer custodians at eight rural community halls and finds the booking system behind a council utilisation rate holds a quarter of the use the custodians counted at the door.
Interviews with 27 volunteer custodians, and a four-week tally in which three uses in four never reached a booking form
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent several years on what a stated priority leaves out. Its latest deposit takes the question to a hall on a country road.
Nobody Books the Hall, released today through the Office of Research Outputs, reports interviews with 27 volunteer custodians across eight community halls in four regional councils, alongside a four-week count the custodians kept themselves. The councils’ booking extracts for the same halls over the same weeks hold 62 of the 247 uses recorded at the door.
A hall nobody books is not a hall nobody uses. It is a hall whose use has no reason to pass through the form.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The work sets a qualitative evidence base beside the councils’ own administrative record: semi-structured interviews coded against a frame closed before any extract was requested, and a tally kept at the door and held blind to the booking data throughout. Four themes carry the account, among them that entering a booking calls up a hire fee and a certificate of currency, and that a hall’s working record is a diary behind a shop counter.
Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, put the result against the schedules that read the rate: “The halls at the bottom of the list turned out to be the ones with the most going on in them. That ordering is what somebody acts on.”
The University takes the view that an indicator’s blind spots belong on the open record beside the indicator, and offers this deposit in that spirit. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1emite.