By Nick Ubels (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 24, 2012
Caffeine dependency, sleep deprivation, the merry sound of overwhelmed freshmen and burnt out seniors weeping softly into their PBR: it’s getting to be that time of the semester when a nervous breakdown is only one reading response away.
Our first essays and exams are pushing the best of us a little too close to our breaking points. The feeble light at the end of the tunnel is the recovery week most of us will require after surviving our midterms. But before you know it, research papers and final projects will jump into sight like an armada of Cylon base stars.
Most of us are more busy than we should be, working part-time (or full-time) jobs and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life through 15-minute Tim Hortons runs. By this point, most of us have transcended the 16-hour day. For a night owl like me, I end up fitting in a lot of my homework after 10 p.m., which is only one of the reasons I find the operating hours of UFV’s Abbotsford library to be sorely lacking.
The library is currently open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. most weekdays, closing at 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday. These restrictive hours only add to the stress of university life during the second half of the semester.
Most—if not all—students have commitments outside of class, especially at a commuter university like UFV. If you’re going to classes and working part-time during the week, this brief window of opportunity to hit the stacks, meet with presentation groups or use UFV’s computer and internet resources is simply inadequate.
While any extension of library operating hours would be a welcome improvement, what we truly need is a library that’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Students should be able to work around their own schedules without having to navigate the insufficient availability of library resources.
Twenty-four hour libraries are catching on in higher education, particularly the United Kingdom where nearly 25 per cent of all universities offer around the clock library access according to a 2010 Times Higher Education survey of post-secondary institutions. It’s a progressive policy suited to the changing student demographic of part-time and mature students who need to work around increasingly tight schedules.
And I seriously doubt any student would complain about being able to put in a couple hours of research whenever they felt like it.
So what are the obstacles to keeping the library open overnight? It’s unlikely UFV’s student body would flock en masse to the library at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday, so staffing would be minimal. UFV could even kill multiple birds with one stone by hiring work-study students from the library and information technology program to work graveyard shifts.
Keeping the library open for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year may seem like a big commitment at first. So start small. Open the library for 24 hours during exam period. If it goes well and students make use of the service, give it a shot during the remainder of the semester.
If UFV wants to fashion itself as a real university, one with a thriving campus culture, where knowledge and learning don’t stop at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, it needs to seriously consider offering students anytime access to one of its most valuable resources.
