This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Library – The Challenges of Modern Library Acoustics

Abstract

Libraries have been changing in recent years, where new or renovation projects have involved the accommodation of library areas in which conversation is permitted and even encouraged.  Such areas are often known as learning commons, collaborative study areas, children's areas and activity areas, and are often all in the same "space" as the more traditional, though smaller, areas of the library. From the acoustic point of view, this is one of a new class of problems which have appeared over recent years where a combination of speech privacy and speech intelligibility needs occur within the same general space. Speech privacy in the "open office” areas is required without the use of traditional partitions. The objective is to achieve a balance of the containment of local noise to the local area, while maintaining a generally open space. The acoustic measures required to do this have been developed for the design of open-concept offices and can be generally applied to libraries.

This paper describes three case studies of modern library design.  The first is a University library which was recently renovated by removing most of the books and acoustic ceiling tile for aesthetic reasons.  The acoustic performance of the renovated space was so poor that the University decided to engage an acoustic consultant.  The second and third libraries are newly constructed buildings, where an acoustic consultant was retained early in the design process to carefully and successfully assist in the design of large interconnected common and performance spaces.