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Lure of Latte: Since a Starbucks was added, activity at WFU library has picked up a lot
Journal Photo by Jennifer Rotenizer
Senior Bill Downey (left) studies with fellow economics major Patrick Howley at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library on campus.
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Published: October 2, 2008
For five years, the Rhoda K. Channing Reading Room at Wake Forest University's Z. Smith Reynolds Library was a sedate space for study, with a conference room and vending machines.
Now, it's laptops and lattes.
A Starbucks opened last week in the reading room, part of a trend across the country in which once-hushed university libraries are being transformed into vibrant campus community centers.
Brittany Wright, a Wake Forest freshman from New Jersey, said that the Starbucks is already luring students to the library. She visited the coffee shop three times in its first week of operation.
"I know there are people who haven't been to the library all year," she said, "and they're suddenly coming."
On Sunday afternoon, the appeal of Starbucks was evident as people poured into the two-level space. Light jazz played in the background. Students tapped on laptops. They rehashed the previous night's parties. They studied in pairs.
The opening of Starbucks was part of a larger library renovation involving 5,900 square feet that includes new study and meeting rooms, and a lounge for graduate students. The Starbucks is operated by Aramark under its contract to provide food and beverages to the Wake Forest community.
Over the past 10 years, as more library materials have become available digitally, the number of library visits has dropped. Libraries felt threatened by the use of the Internet for research, said Lynn Sutton, the library's director.
"The thinking was libraries were getting rid of print. We won't need libraries. Why continue to pay for libraries?" Sutton said.
But as librarians across the country talked, they began to realize that libraries had a larger role to play in campus culture. Libraries were not just purveyors of information but important places in the life of the campus -- places for people to meet, study and exchange ideas.
Sutton and another librarian surveyed students at Wake Forest and UNC Greensboro in the spring of 2007, she said. Their work confirmed the importance of libraries in student life.
"Students here study hard," she said. "They're known for being hard-working students, and they value places that let them do that."
But socializing is also important, Sutton said, even when students are studying.
"They're always aware of who is there," she said. "Seeing and being seen is what it's about." The library renovation dovetailed with discussions going on around the Wake Forest campus in which students and faculty members lamented the lack of places on campus to hang out, Sutton said. Increasingly informal meeting space has been converted to offices, classrooms and formal meeting rooms.
"There's this craving for community," she said. "People wanted to be a community, but they didn't have a place to be a community."
The library is the last stop on the Wake Forest admissions tour, and the Starbucks now gives parents and potential students a place to catch their breath, she said.
"You can regroup and at the same time, you're absorbing the culture of the place," she said.
Patrick Roberts, a sophomore economics major, said that he had been to Starbucks a few times in its first week.
"Every time I'm about to fall asleep and I'm studying, I come down here and get a triple shot of espresso," Roberts said.
He said he thinks that Starbucks will be good for Wake Forest.
Sutton said she visited libraries at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and she liked what she saw.
"A Starbucks is a hub of activity," she said. "There are people flowing in and out of there every hour it's open. It's a destination."
The Starbucks stores also functioned as informal community centers, she said, where people put up posters for community events.
Barbara Dewey, the dean of libraries at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, said that the library there added its Starbucks last fall.
"It has made a radical, transformational change in the way the library was used," Dewey said.
The library was overwhelmed at first, she said. But librarians found that having the Starbucks kept students there longer, and the longer they stayed, the more they used library resources. Students asked for more tutorials, for writing help and for computer help.
Students can do a lot of work in their dorm rooms, Dewey said, but she has found that they want to be together even when they're working individually.
The increased use of the library at first brought with it a little friction between people who wanted the library to stay a quiet place to study and those who wanted to work in groups.
Librarians have created separate spaces for quiet and for groups to accommodate the two different styles of studying, Dewey said.
The increase in library use has also created more wear and tear, Sutton said, but she prefers that to a library with perfectly maintained resources that no one uses.
■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com.
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