Bookworms as information literacy? How Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad encouraged OCAD University to re-place the art library through site-interventions

Abstract

Does the art library need re-placing? Using the commentary of an OCAD University faculty member concerning “a perception issue with the library and its use,” librarian Daniel Payne uses theorist Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad to decode, in general terms, undergraduate students’ understanding of libraries as articulated in the OCLC Perceptions of libraries surveys. In an attempt to re-align concepts of the library as place at OCAD University, an exhibition review interpretation of student site-interventions demonstrates how visual communication can offer more insightful “spatial practices” for both students and library staff. In the process, librarians were challenged to accommodate student creative voices that pushed both policy boundaries and comfort zones. Although a small-scale information literacy initiative in which no formal quantitative data was collected, the ability of having conceptual models of librarians interact and even clash with those of students helped realign both stakeholders’ understandings of libraries as complex spatial entities.