Many of you requested additional hours, primarily during three different times of day: later hours on weeknights; later hours on Friday and Saturday evenings; and additional summer hours. "The evening hours are too short" "[More] Friday hours." "Times on the weekend to study." "[Request for] longer hours." "The one thing in the library that needs the most improvement is that it needs to be open a little later." "Longer hours. I think the library should be opened until 2." "Earlier hours on Sunday would be nice." "Being open 100% of the time (Unrealistic though that it is)" "The library on the weekends needs to be open for a longer amount of time." "I wish the library had longer hours on the weekends." "I wish it opened earlier during the summer hours." "Longer hours on the weekends." "[More] hours during the summer." "Could the library close at midnight on Fridays?" "Not having it open on the weekend nights does seem to be inconvenient." "I wish the library were open longer at night." "The hours of operation should be expanded, if possible. I know that's what a lot of people complain about because students need some place to go at all hours of the day if needed in order to study and do homework without interruption or distraction." "I think there could be later hours for the week." "I wish the library was open later on Fridays because I like to do work on Fridays in the library but it is always closed." "A few times I wanted to go Friday night but it had closed early." "I needed to print something off on Saturday and the library was already closed." "The weekend is when I do the bulk of my homework to prepare for the week ahead since I do not have classes. I look forward to hunker down and do work Friday and Saturday nights; it's the perfect opportunity to get work done with being stressed and with no time commitments. On a campus as secluded as Hollins, with no option to study at a place that's nearby, its library needs to be accessible every evening of the week. As a student who does academics later in the day because I have classes and a day job, I use many hours in the evening and night to complete my homework and use the library's services"
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We understand the desire to use the library at any time of day; it’s a wonderful place to work, and we love it.
However, as you know, we don’t have an unlimited budget or staff, meaning that we have to make hard decisions about how we deploy our resources and which hours we are open.
One major limiting factor for us is that we do not have a separate room within the library that has outside access and that can be locked apart from the rest of the library. Thus, if we want to extend hours, we must have staff in the building to ensure the security of the library’s resources.
We regularly track and evaluate the number of people in the library during the course of the day (at least one week every semester is set aside for tracking . At this point, we do not see that usage justifies any extra hours during the academic semesters. For example, we have very few people in the library on Fridays and Saturdays, making it difficult to argue for extending hours in the evenings those days. When we extend our hours before and during finals weeks, we see rapidly decreasing library usage after 11 p.m., making it hard for us to consider extending hours past midnight throughout the semester. If we desired to extend hours, we would need to ask the HU administration for additional staff and funds, and right now we don’t think we could justify such a request.
We do hope to extend summer semester hours, by opening at 8 a.m. instead of 8:30, to give graduate students the time to print materials prior to their 9 a.m. classes. This will be dependent on having money available.
Please do continue to let us know when you want to use the library, and show us with your presence in the library that you value what the library offers. We will continue to listen, and do our best, within our resource constraints, to meet your needs.
Questions about the survey?
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