A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities reports occupancy distributions for bags left on library chairs, and Library Services will close the floor once bag-counted utilisation reaches 85 percent.
Walk-throughs of four reading rooms found 38 percent of occupied seats held only a bag at 14:00, and the 85 percent threshold has no ordinary override.
The walk-through has been counting bags as bodies for as long as anyone has been walking the floor. We have only given that count a door.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, led by Dr Solheim with Senior Lecturer Fenna Okoro, Convenor of the Horizon Register, and Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg, sets the University’s own reading-room walk-through against the chairs it already treats as taken. Hourly passes of four floors over a teaching semester coded every seat as body, bag-only, or empty, and timed how long an unattended bag held the chair. At two in the afternoon, 38 percent of occupied seats held only a bag. Median dwell was 2.4 hours on the silent floor and under an hour on the lower ground.
The finding sits inside the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda, which follows what an institution does with a number once the number is allowed to decide something. Library Services will adopt bag-presence as the official utilisation count and close the floor at 85 percent bag-counted occupancy, with no exception sustained for more than a single review cycle. A modelled close at that threshold would have turned the turnstile on 11 of the 16 sampled weeks while roughly one in four “occupied” seats still had no body.
Dr Okoro said the Horizon Register will hold the 85 percent threshold as a standing entry. “A bag-counted close is now a named event, not a complaint at the desk.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.64wem9.