In space no one hears you scream (tagline from 1979 sci fi blockbuster Alien)

but we did hear students complain about the lack of space in the Library...

This session is about how the Library, ITS and Facilities departments worked together to let students know just how much study space was available on campus. WE CAME UP WITH A WORLD'S FIRST THAT WE WANT TO SHARE!

We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which this campus is located and their ancestors past and present.

This is Shane Skidmore our Associate
Director, Applications from Information Technology Services The force is strong with Shane he is one of the good guys.

Swinburne is a mid-sized, dual sector, young university in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne. Our vision by 2020 to be Australia's leading university of science, technology and innovation. We have just over 49,000 on shore students. This issue arose at our main campus located in Hawthorn.

Hawthorn is home to the majority of courses offered by Swinburne.

We have a students first ethos at Swinburne and their experience is important to us. In 2013 Swinburne made the momentous decision to close two campuses after our State Government made huge cuts to VET sector funding.

As a result of this "transformation" the Library underwent a massive project to merge the collections form our closed campuses into Hawthorn whilst trying to keep our collection footprint the same.

But there were concerns from the student body and library staff that our building wouldn't cope. Complaints did increase through our formal complaints mechanisms, on social media and through our student consultation committees such as the Student Representative Council.

Our library space at Hawthorn was already at capacity. We were worried. So we adopted a multi pronged strategy:


1. satellite silent study spaces
2. marketing campaign
3. study spaces app
4. revamped web page

Partnership between ITS/Facilities/Library essential for success.

It was important to the project to define what we understood study space to mean, as there is quite a lot of informal study space on and around campus.

We defined study space as the following:

good lighting
power
wifi
desks or tables

The Library is the biggest provider of open access study and computing space on campus.

Every client survey tells us a similar story - students want more quiet space especially around exam period so we set two new satellite quiet/silent spaces which the library manages. A total of 157 more seats.

We also decided that we wanted to tell students about the availability of student study space on campus.

We take feedback seriously especially since the SRC have direct access to our VC and our VP!

I had student reps in my office and we worked with our University comms team to respond to the comments from on social media (facebook/Twitter).

The idea for the app came from:

Derek Whitehead our former University Librarian and then CIO had an epiphany!

.... took a solution from a different context and applied it to our problem - boom = innovation


the app is a world first and we are want to tell you how simple it was to create it

space management

Derek Whitehead thought so. He was a Chadstone an enormous shopping mall in Melbourne and the carpark had just installed a parking guidance system. He thought to himself I wonder if we can apply this system to our space problem.

The parking guidance systems indicates where the empty carparks are located using LED screens and a red/amber/green system.

He excitedly shared the idea with others in the University. Allocated a small budget and we were off. The project was so small we didn't need to use the ITS Project Office! And there was some extra funding around for transforming Swinburne.

ALL ABOUT SPACE MANAGEMENT

Once we put in the bits in place.... a wonderful thing happened complaints about space dropped by 81%

with the additional spaces (157 seats)
low touch project management
most of app development by an IBL (industry based learning) student

Simple, elegant and reasonably low cost solution. Did I say a world's first?!

‘At the same time we were developing the Study Spaces app, we were also establishing the Swinburne app. This became the delivery mechanism for Study Spaces.

The Swinburne app was developed on the Blackboard Mosaic platform, which enabled us to collect all the various native and mobile web apps that on-campus students were using and bundle them together in one container app. This enables students to only have to download one app from the app stores.
There are currently 13 apps contained in the platform which includes timetabling, Blackboard mobile, Collaborate, staff directory, video feeds, news feeds, security and student service information and contacts, Library services, campus maps and of course, Study Spaces.
It is quite easy to add new apps into the Swinburne app.

The Study Spaces app was built in HTML5, so it is a web app. This means it does not have to be downloaded from an app store and we only have to maintain one code base. We now get to the fun part, you can link to this web site through any browser on your device by connecting to the following URL
http://m.swinburne.edu.au/study-spaces/
You are now looking at the live app and you can see the list of available study spaces at the Hawthorn campus. The green bars represent the availability in the area and you can also see the capacity of each area. The screen can be sorted and filtered in various ways.

You can also flag spaces as favourites and view maps of where each study space is located

The technology we are using is Cognimatics TrueView Counter system. A camera is place above the entrances to each study space and create two virtual lines covering about a 2 metre width. One study space area has an entrance about 3 metres wide and we have been able to put two cameras in parallel. Movement is detected by each camera across the virtual lines and the camera detects the direction the person is moving in and out the area. Some study space have multiple entry points and we have a camera for each entry point.

Each camera has a fixed IP address and API interface which can be called to return in and out counts based on a time period. We have built a service in JMS which calls each camera every minute and updates a central MySQL Location database.
The study space app uses AJAX to dynamically call an ESB service which returns the current counts of each location from the Location database back to the Study Space app.

Thank you for your time
We have been Kim Tairi and Shane Skidmore and we smashed it.