Finding Common Ground: Information Commons and the (Radical) Revitalization of Academic Libraries

The academic literature the first portion of this paper discusses includes scholarly commentaries on the history, planning, development, and implementation of information commons from across the country. The research study described and analyzed in the second and third portions of this paper is based on six semi-structured interviews with library staff members (four from North Carolina State University's D.H. Hill Library and two from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Davis Library.) Providing a synthesis of the remarks these librarians made while interviewed, this portion of the paper is divided into three critical incidents around which the semi-interviews were structured: the planning of information commons, the implementation of information commons, and an evaluation of the success of the information commons at both the D.H. Hill Library and Davis Library