Final Report of the Learning Commons Assessment Task Force

This report follows the structure outlined by the Learning Commons Assessment Task Force charge to make recommendations to the Provost’s Learning Commons Committee for major renovations and restructuring of space and services provided in the UMass Amherst Learning Commons. These recommendations include results from assessment undertaken by the task force and collaborators, literature review, and site visits to comparable institutions with learning and/or information commons models. Also included are floor plans and overviews of floor layout for the reinvention of the Learning Commons on the Lower Level of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. The Learning Commons Assessment Task Force (LCATF), in operation for nearly two years, has conducted extensive research, multiple site visits, and many different types of qualitative and quantitative data gathering to inform recommendations for large-scale change to the Learning Commons (LC) in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. These changes are broken into a phased implementation process, which the group feels is the best approach to a project of this scale, given the amount of disruption it will cause to student use of the space and amount of organizational change that will be necessary to accommodate new directions for the Libraries. These recommendations are based on what the group feels is the best direction, moving toward optimal support of our main constituency, the undergraduate student, while not overlooking our graduate students, faculty, staff, and patrons from the Commonwealth