This morning, we departed the hotel around 9:30 am to head for our site visit at the TU Delft Library. TU Delft is a scientific and engineering university with 23,500 students that was founded in 1842. The TU Delft library is one of three libraries on campus with the other two being architecture and civil engineering libraries. They have a staff of around 114 with most of the working primarily in TU Delft main branch. The library itself is designed in the shape of a cone that sticks out way above the ground making it a very unique and recognizable building. The cone itself is actually filled with four floors of study space for university students. On the ground floor beneath the cone, there is more study space for students and an entire computer room that students can use their university ID to log into.
We spent about 45 minutes touring around the building which is filled with a three story wall of books, a cafe and even an exhibit designed by a student. The exhibit was centered around questioning whether the food packaging that is used in the Netherlands is actually safe. To me, that was particularly interesting since the United States has been having a conversation around the safety of plastic used to package food. There has been a push to move towards compostable options that are safer, more sustainable and better for the environment. I don’t really know anything about the Netherlands in terms of their sustainability efforts, but it does make me wonder if we will see a similar push from this generation of students towards healthier and more sustainable food packaging options. I think in many ways the Netherlands are more sustainable, especially in carbon emissions, but they have other areas like food packaging that they still have a long way to go on.
In all honesty, the TU Delft library really does remind me of the way that libraries at the University of Washington work. They have study rooms available to book for up to three hours at a time and access academic research resources to assist them in classes. They can also access the research system online at home, which is exactly how the UW runs our research databases for students. The main thing that does seem different about this library is that they offer a lot more of a range of physical books inside the library than a lot of the places we call libraries at the UW. When I think of Foster Library, it really just consists of only study place and tables in the main area of the library whereas TU Delft combines both the books and study spaces into one area. Since it seems like we tend to consider most of the libraries in the Netherlands innovative in comparison to those in the United States, it seems to be a good sign that the way UW is thinking about their libraries is progressive and innovative for students.
We headed into a room on the main floor of the library to learn some more information about the university, the library itself and some of the main projects and initiatives they were working on. One of my favorite things from the presentation was the fact that they are making an effort to teach libraries job related coding and version control to better keep up with the changing digital landscape of the library system. It is an open access resource which means that the course is free online for anyone to take and there are certified and trained professionals that are available to help those taking the course. She also mentioned the growth of their Computer Science program at the University that has pushed them to hire on a lot of staff to help teach basic coding skills to students and faculty. TU Delft is a research institution, so just like the University of Washington, their professors are both teaching and completing research during their time at TU Delft.
We had about a two hour break for lunch before we reassembled in the breakfast room for class. One of the biggest things we talked about during our presentation at TU Delft Library was open-access to materials. Personally, I have worked a little bit with open-access but I lack a lot of the technical knowledge and understanding of current discussions and implications around the topic. I was very glad that Trent decided the first part of class would be a good time to clarify what open-access is for those of us who were still a little fuzzy on the idea. Basically, the one idea that really stood out to me and that was very clear is that “open-access gold” is achieved when someone can read an article published in a journal without having to pay a subscription fee to the journal itself. I get the sense that in reality, that is a rare thing to have happen as publishing companies are far more concerned about their bottom line than providing open-access to their information.