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Student Library Ownership and Building

the Communicative Commons
a
Margaret Browndorf
a
Towson University, Towson, MD, USA
Published online: 25 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Margaret Browndorf (2014) Student Library Ownership and Building
the Communicative Commons, Journal of Library Administration, 54:2, 77-93, DOI:
10.1080/01930826.2014.903364

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 Journal of Library Administration, 54:77–93, 2014
Published with license by Taylor & Francis
ISSN: 0193-0826 print / 1540-3564 online
DOI: 10.1080/01930826.2014.903364

Student Library Ownership and Building

the Communicative Commons

MARGARET BROWNDORF
Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

ABSTRACT. Based on William Birdsall’s research on the Com-

municative Commons (2010), this research moves toward rework-
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ing the commons model by integrating classical definitions of the

commons with theories of psychological ownership, the Informa-
tion/Learning Commons, and engaged learning and citizenship
behaviors. This research seeks to enable institutions without the
financial resources for physical renovations projects to create an
environment in their libraries capable of training students to be-
come citizen-scholars by providing the goal of increasing student
ownership over library resources. It argues that prioritizing student
participation within the library may be the best preparation for
participation in the wider cultural commons post-graduation.

KEYWORDS academic libraries, communicative commons,

learning commons, information commons, commons, psycholog-
ical ownership, experiential learning, citizenship, participation,
engaged learning

Media and information in the 21st century has increasingly been defined
by participatory technologies and attitudes. In response to this move to-
ward sharing and changes in technology, communication, and information
paradigms, Birdsall proposed the “Communicative Commons” as a new com-
mons model to suggest a different way to conceptualize connecting stu-
dents to the greater cultural commons (2010). Although his model lacks
grounding in real world models and operates under older theorization of

© Margaret Browndorf
This article was completed and accepted for publication while author was employed as
Social Sciences Librarian, North Dakota State University.
Address correspondence to Margaret Browndorf, Reference and Instruction Librarian—
History, Albert S. Cook Library, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD 21252,
USA. E-mail: mbrowndorf@towson.edu

77
 78 M. Browndorf

information-sharing and the Internet, it does offer a structure with which to

reconsider the commons in academic libraries.
The crux of the model is a “genuine collaborative relationship with users
as equals in the identification and development of communicative commons
resources” (Birdsall, 2010, p. 242). Building on the advances that the learn-
ing commons model had made to the original information commons, the
communicative commons seeks to make the entire library a dynamic learn-
ing environment. While the Learning Commons gives an environment where
students can guide their own learning and work together, the Communicative
Commons takes this a step further and involves students in the building of
this environment, moving students from passive receivers of library resources
to partners in building and sharing resources.
The work at hand uses the theories of governance and ownership to
support the Communicative Commons as a way to strengthen student pre-
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paredness to participate in the global cultural commons on the whole. It

seeks to enable interested institutions without the financial resources for ex-
pensive physical renovations projects to still create an environment in their
libraries capable of training students to become active citizen-scholars by
providing the concrete goal of increasing student ownership over library
resources. I argue that prioritizing student participation within the library
and in the development of library resources may be the best preparation for
eventual student participation in the wider cultural commons after leaving
the university environment. Furthermore, I argue that engendering student
feelings of ownership for the library is one way to use the library to support
active and experiential learning of information use and reuse.
By involving students more actively in the development and governance
of their research and learning resources, it may be possible to affect the
far-reaching and transformational change of Beagle’s knowledge commons
(2006) with limited funding and without physical change and renovation.
This Commons would be based not only in aiding student consumption of
information resources, but also in communicating their findings and ideas
back to their communities and the larger cultural commons.
The Communicative Commons is the outgrowth of 30 years of aca-
demic libraries’ journey beyond their original mission of collecting physi-
cal resources toward providing access to the wealth of information in the
larger cultural commons—that structure which represents shared cultural
and global knowledge. Furthermore, it builds on many years’ scholarly de-
velopment of the idea of the commons itself and pedagogical developments
emphasizing active learning. This work will provide historical and theoretical
context for the Communicative Commons idea, then provide an overview of
the concept of psychological ownership and how it is imperative to the en-
actment of a Communicative Commons. Finally, it highlights some potential
ways that institutions can make changes that provide students with a stronger
feeling of ownership and control over the library and library resources and
 Student Library Ownership and Building 79

prepare them to participate more fully in the global knowledge commons

after they leave the university environment.

THE COMMONS CONTEXT

The term “commons” has come to refer to any resource that is available for
shared use and upkeep by a group of individuals. While the term began
as a definition for the shared grazing and gardening fields of English 16th-
century “commoners,” it has come to encompass an incredible variety of
resources and tools shared by groups and society as a whole—fisheries,
oceans, the environment, open-access scholarly resources, and collections
of open-source code. Ultimately, all of these resources have one thing they
share with modern understandings of information: they are monitored and
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maintained by their community of users (Ostrom & Hess, 2003).

The success of a commons relies on its ability to remain open for use and
control by all of its users without falling victim to overuse or privatization.
Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” used the example of
the gradual enclosure of common grazing land in England to argue that a
commons must eventually become enclosed to limit use, else individuals
use too much of the resource at hand without returning value. Thus, all
examples of the commons would either end in privatization or destruction
of the common resource (Hardin, 1968).
Since the publication of Hardin’s essay, scholarship on the commons
has exploded with individuals defining, redefining, and adjusting definitions
of the commons and arguing against the inevitability of Hardin’s conclusions.
Scholars have since argued that many societies holding a commons resource
will come together to create rules to govern its use (Ostrom, 2000). Fur-
thermore, there are resources that are left unharmed by significant use and
are even apt to grow with increased use—many digital repositories of infor-
mation, knowledge, and open-source software among them (Bollier, 2007).
Shared resources, such as open, virtually accessible knowledge, which may
not have existed 20 years ago, are now part of a vibrant debate due to
both the growth of literature and growth of the Internet. The commons has
become an important method to theorize and analyze dilemmas related to
sharing and stewarding information (Hess & Ostrom, 2007).
Similarly, the idea of the commons came to academic libraries in the
early 1990s as a way to pool technological tools and research knowledge
for common use among students and to aid access to the larger commons
developing online. The idea originated to provide physical access to the
developing, networked cultural commons via a flexible media-rich space
within a library. It has grown to encompass a designed environment for in-
cidental/informal, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and self-directed learning
(Beatty & White, 2005). The implementation of the information commons is
 80 M. Browndorf

traditionally a combined physical, virtual, and cultural change involving staff

training and integration of resources. Over the past several years, the em-
phasis of commons projects has shifted from providing information toward
facilitating learning and evolving a structure that is based not on slight adjust-
ments and isolated changes, but rather on far-reaching and transformational
changes to the learning environment (Beagle, 2012).
Early in the history of the information commons, literature about and
discussion of the physical information commons became divorced from the
theoretical consideration of the greater Cultural Commons. Beagle theo-
rized a three-tiered structure to the Information Commons of the academic
library—a physical commons core, providing access to a virtual commons,
as part of a larger cultural commons (Beagle, 2006). As technology has
evolved, so has the model of the physical commons. The Information Com-
mons morphed into a Learning Commons model, which emphasized larger,
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more transformative change. While the Information Commons model repre-

sents adjustment and/or isolated change, the Learning Commons represents
far-reaching and/or transformational change (Beagle, 2006). The latter pro-
vides room for continued change and changes the emphasis from the library
to the learner, offering services and tools beyond simple information access.
The Learning Commons pulls in new instructional technologies and allows
space for student-directed learning.
With the development of “Web 2.0” or social, collaborative, technolo-
gies, new theorizations of the function and definition of a library commons
have likewise developed. Birdsall has offered the “Communicative Com-
mons” as a method to prepare students to work in this new interactive and
collaboration-heavy environment. His work “Learning Commons to Commu-
nicative Commons” offers, among other points, that the commons no longer
need to be “envisioned as a place in the library but encompass [. . .] the
library as a whole” and to establish “objectives and services focused on dy-
namic communicative processes rather than the relatively passive provision
of information” (Birdsall, 2010, p. 243).

PSYCHOLOGICAL OWNERSHIP

With the history of the commons both in and out of libraries in mind, this
article suggests that the physical renovations and change that have been
integral to commons development in the past may no longer be the key
change to connect students with the larger cultural commons. Rather, to
achieve the connection to the larger cultural commons through the academic
library, one needs to provide students with feelings of ownership over the
library and the library resources.
This is best done through providing them with a measure of control
over and investment in the shape of library resources and the shape of their
 Student Library Ownership and Building 81

own learning. By ceding a measure of control and encouraging psycholog-

ical ownership of the library on the whole, we can better provide a space
for students to learn how to integrate into the larger cultural commons of
the 21st century. While requiring creativity and dedication of librarians and
administrators, the change inherent in encouraging psychological ownership
has the potential to be less resource-intensive than the renovation projects of
the past. Emphasizing cultural change over physical change, this approach
may enable institutions unable to afford renovation projects to still use the li-
brary as a portal to the larger cultural commons and train students to become
active citizens.
Literature of the commons, particularly of the cultural commons, em-
phasizes the role that governance and ownership must play in the success
and sustainability of a commons. When confronted with dilemmas of sharing
and managing resources, individuals who are duly invested and have struc-
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tures to communicate with each other are capable of creating the rules to
govern these resources (Ostrom, 1994). The literature on ownership echoes
this idea that individuals who feel ownership of a resource are more likely
to put effort toward building and maintaining that resource. Individuals who
“own” institutions (objects, ideas, spaces) tend to put a higher value on them
and are more likely to protect and defend that institution (Baer & Brown,
2012; Ledgerwood, 2007).
Ownership is a construct built at the intersection between “real” property
ownership and mental conviction (Etzioni, 1991). The concept of psycholog-
ical ownership heavily relies on the latter of these two elements. Feelings of
ownership can occur for physical objects, ideas, organizations, institutions,
anything that is separate from the self and which an individual wishes to
connect to the self (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2003). While a university, for
example, may be “owned” by a board of trustees or taxpayers, it is still pos-
sible for students to feel psychological ownership over the university and
see it as their institution. Furthermore, collective psychological ownership
allows a group to simultaneously feel belonging to the group and owner-
ship of the group’s final product as an “us” and with a “single and shared
mind-set” (Pierce & Jussila, 2010).
It is clear from the literature that psychological ownership has both ma-
terial and psychological effects. Individuals with greater identification with
the group that owns a building or has historical connection to a building, for
example, will generally value that building more highly monetarily (Ledger-
wood, 2007). Additionally, the effect of organizational change on feelings of
ownership can affect the adoption and negative or positive response to that
change (Baer & Brown, 2012). In the business world, Van Dyne and Pierce
have connected feelings of psychological ownership to job satisfaction (Van
Dyne & Pierce, 2004). Together, these studies and those like them show
that individuals who feel more psychological ownership of an idea, object,
or organization are more likely to feel positively toward it and act in its
 82 M. Browndorf

best interests. Psychological ownership positively associates with citizenship

behaviors and strength of feelings of responsibility and stewardship (Pierce,
Kostova, & Dirks, 2003).
There is no set of actions offered in the literature for engendering feel-
ings of ownership where they do not exist, nor is there a single point offered
to explain how they come into being. Points of development include con-
trol, intimate knowledge, self-identification, and effort and investment, in
relationship to the target of ownership (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2003). Fac-
tual ownership indeed correlates with feelings of psychological ownership.
Control over institutional decisions and resource use, while not necessarily
being factual ownership, shares many of the characteristics thereof (Reb &
Connolly, 2007). Inversely, rigid hierarchical structures, which do not allow
interested parties to create change in the relevant constructs at their institu-
tion, hamper the development of psychological ownership (Pierce, Kostova,
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& Dirks, 2003).

In his CLIR report “Libraries Designed for Learning,” Bennett offered that
“The greatest challenge in designing a learning commons is to conceive of
it as ‘owned’ by the learners, not by teachers, whether faculty or librarians”
(Bennett, 2003, p. 39). This report is 10 years old, yet conceptual ownership
remains a significant challenge in designing learning spaces and structures
within the library. One reason may be that while students are the center of
all learning commons changes, two pieces inherent in psychological owner-
ship are missing—control and investment. While student needs are studied,
students themselves are not partners in making learning commons changes
(Birdsall, 2010).
The debate about bringing students into the library as conceptual own-
ers has been inherent in the debate about the commons in the library since
its beginning, although no approach has fully realized this ownership. The
development of the Learning Commons paradigm has moved us forward by
its focus on engaged learning and collaborative work. The Communicative
Commons paradigm may be able to move us forward even further by pre-
ferring communication and resource creation over resource provision, thus
necessitating student control. The methods to encourage psychological own-
ership of the library and library resources among student users will thus lie
in encouraging control and investment and dismantling some of the hierar-
chical structures of knowledge sharing inherent in the library itself. In his
1999 “Conceptualization of the Information Commons,” Beagle challenged
the rigid hierarchical structures of the library for exactly this reason: “If li-
brarians truly want to engage students actively in the processes of change,
they will not be well served by restricting information services to the old
reference desk delivery approach of handing out explicit facts and chunks
of information” (Beagle, 1999, p. 88). This approach has changed drastically
since 1999, and few academic librarians would argue that their primary task
 Student Library Ownership and Building 83

is to hand out information. Yet the hierarchy of knowledge in which the

librarian remains as steward persists.
By ceding at least a measure of resource control and development to
students, we can encourage feelings of investment and ownership. Instead
of merely providing the resources, libraries have the potential to move their
stewardship activities toward offering tools and standards to ensure qual-
ity and sustainable resource-creation (Lougee, 2007, p. 322). By providing
frameworks and allowing students to fill these frameworks in their own
ways, we are encouraging them to feel invested in the knowledge resources
sheltered by the library and librarians.

BENEFITS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE COMMONS PARADIGM

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There are many benefits that the Communicative Commons offers that build
on the paradigms of the past. There are significant issues with the way that
Birdsall presents the argument for a Communicative Commons, not the least
of which is a heavy reliance on the language of human rights. He argues
that the library can help a citizen to exercise the “right to communicate”
(Birdsall, 2005). This work is heavily informed by Jean d’Arcy’s scholarship
from before the development of Internet communication and furthermore
social media technologies, which argues that the “mass media mentality”
of a top-down vertical flow of information eclipsed the capability and need
for many-to-many horizontal communication (d’Arcy, 1983). The assumption
then becomes that the openness of the Internet allows for greater horizontal
communication between peers.
Although this may be the case, the ownership of the means of commu-
nication remains significant; it controls what information is communicated,
by whom, and to where (Peters, Gietzen, & Ondercin, 2012). The Commu-
nicative Commons paradigm can move beyond simply enabling students to
share information with each other. Rather we can change to focus toward
preparing students to understand how these pathways of communication
work, participate actively in them, and take ownership of their maintenance.
This better prepares students to interact intelligently with communication
technologies and prepares them to make intelligent decisions about how
and why they create and share knowledge.
Beagle argues in his “conceptualization” that the collaborative elements
of the Information Commons “can shape knowledge in ways that parallel
the large-scale evolution of knowledge in the culture around us” (Beagle,
1999, p. 88). That “evolution of knowledge” has changed the face of schol-
arly communication in addition to ownership regimes of information, online
resources, and media. By prioritizing the training of students as individuals
not only informed, but prepared to share their information and act on this
 84 M. Browndorf

knowledge, the Communicative Commons paradigm keeps the key features

of the information commons as a collaborative and student-focused space,
while expanding beyond the space itself to prioritize the actions instead of
the place where these actions occur (Birdsall, 2010). It attempts to better
parallel the greater amorphous dynamic knowledge commons within the
library.
The concept of sharing and open knowledge has become common-
place over the past several years and transformed the scholarly commu-
nication landscape. Scholarly conversations can happen faster and easier
than ever before. Scholars “reclaim control over their intellectual assets” and
move “from passive appropriator[s] of information to active provider[s] of
information by contributing directly into the common pool” (Kranich, 2007,
pp. 94–95).
This emerging landscape has not only been made possible by new tech-
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nologies but has been necessitated by them. Social media and the growth
of user-created content has changed the model of knowledge creation and
consumption toward one of openness (Peters, Gietzen, & Ondercin, 2012).
All individuals with an Internet connection and appropriate media tools
are equipped to create and share their own content, and many do so. It
thus becomes imperative to teach students how to live and work in that
environment—how to intelligently and deliberately make decisions that ad-
vance knowledge and maintain the scholarly knowledge commons when
participating in sharing regimes. To be successful in the paradigm of open-
ness, students must be taught not only how to be information-literate and
synthesize the information they gather from the cultural commons, but how
to give back to that commons.
Another clear benefit of the Communicative Commons framework and
engendering feelings of ownership in library resources is that it can en-
able citizenship and willingness to participate actively in the growth and
maintenance of the larger cultural commons. In his chapter in Hess and Os-
trom’s Understanding Knowledge as a Commons entitled “Collective Action,
Civic Engagement, and the Knowledge Commons,” Levine argues that “cre-
ating public knowledge [is] an additional good, because such work builds
social capital, strengthens communities, and gives people skills that they
need for effective citizenship” (p. 247). To that end, he suggests that stu-
dents need to be trained to participate in creating public knowledge as a
way of training them to be productive citizens of the larger cultural com-
mons (Levine, 2007). Furthermore, it has been suggested that knowledge-
sharing, particularly through virtual media, can increase citizenship behav-
iors such as stewardship and participation in dialogues (Xu, Li, & Shao,
2012).
Training students to participate in the civic structures of today is no
longer just the provision of computers and multimedia tools they will be
able to understand and use after graduation. Media literacy—the ability to
 Student Library Ownership and Building 85

use, understand, and critically approach media—has become necessary to

active citizenship in the 21st century United States (Mihailidis & Thevenin,
2013). However, it is now just as important to make them literate in effective,
ethical and informed sharing practice—communicative structures—as that
has equally become a method of executing citizenship rights. By giving
students control over the creation of public knowledge, it is possible to then
translate these behaviors to useful citizenship behaviors that engage them
with literate expressions of opinion and active participation in their larger
communities.
The library is a natural laboratory for students to practice and engage in
acting as citizens and prepare to be involved in civic and democratic struc-
tures. Libraries, particularly public libraries, have long served communities as
commons with a goal of creating an informed citizenry (Kranich, 2004). Being
informed is no longer the only key to acting in the best interest of the self and
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society; instead, expression of this information is of paramount importance

(Birdsall, 2010). This expression can be aided by tools that encourage asso-
ciational virtual structures and can support efforts toward collective action
and civic engagement through self-governance structures (Kranich, 2007).

PEDAGOGY, OWNERSHIP, AND THE COMMUNICATIVE

COMMONS

It is no longer the role of the library or even of university education to

purely provide the information and analytical tools that students need to
be successful scholars, workers, and citizens. This parallels the move in
pedagogy of higher education toward engaged and active learning. The
dominant thought in pedagogy has moved from provision of knowledge
to creation of knowledge. Students are no longer the passive recipients of
instructor wisdom, but have become active learners in producing knowledge
and understanding. The dominant paradigm in education has shifted toward
the Learning Paradigm Barr and Tagg championed in their 1995 article “From
teaching to learning—A new paradigm for undergraduate education” (Barr
& Tagg, 1995).
As a result, learning spaces have changed significantly. Where Barr
and Tagg have suggested that learning environments, specifically, would be
“learner-centered,” they have become so in the case of the academic learn-
ing commons. However, these spaces have not similarly become “learner-
controlled” (Barr & Tagg, 1995, p. 21). Libraries have done well creating
learner-centered spaces and accompanying projects that fulfill the needs of
students, but the impetus for and creation of these spaces and projects has
come almost exclusively from the top. Librarians and administrators pro-
vide spaces and students use these spaces to access the global knowledge
commons.
 86 M. Browndorf

Yet, while the spaces themselves enable active student participation in

their own learning, space implementation and the library itself still replicate
the hierarchical instructor-student paradigm. With the Communicative Com-
mons the library itself can become a laboratory in which students create
knowledge and resources for their peers and the greater cultural commons
to use. To enable students to feel ownership in the greater cultural commons
and prepare them to communicate and share the ideas and resources they
create as scholars, we should give them ownership in the library. This in-
volves creating investment in the library resources and giving students some
control.
The question then becomes, how does one implement the paradigm
of the Communicative Commons and provide students with an appropriate
measure of control? No singular method has yet been employed. In fact, the
very nature of this paradigm means that the possible forms that a Commu-
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nicative Commons can take is limited only by the creativity of the students,
librarians, and administrators at an institution. That is not to say that this
model cannot benefit from the funding or renovations that have charac-
terized the information commons and learning commons paradigms. But
making the goal to provide ownership of the library to students and enable
their capability to participate instead of simply provide the tools means that
institutions are not bound solely by renovation projects and providing new
technologies as ways to train students to operate in the greater scholarly
and knowledge commons. A certain basic level of technology is helpful to
prepare students for interaction with the greater commons—computers and
Internet connection—but beyond that technology and space renovation, be-
comes a matter of possibility and not necessity in order to train towards the
global commons.
In Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources, Ostrom, Gardner, and
Walker suggest that “Individuals who extend reciprocity to others and who
learn to craft their own effective rules can accomplish more than individ-
uals who do not, especially when they can identify others following the
same heuristics” (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 2003, p. 327). By creating rule
structures and creating communication channels, individuals can create the
feelings of common ownership of a single entity. It follows that providing
students the ability to work together to craft their own rules over use of a
resource may aid in creating feelings of ownership of that resource. Further-
more, it prepares students for a world in which, in addition to being users of
a resource, individuals are increasingly both shareholders and rule-makers.
By working together to create sustainable rules for a space or resource within
the library, students will have control and will feel invested in this resource.
This should encourage students to care for and maintain that resource and
thus be trained to not only use information resources, but to create them.
By extension, they can be trained to not only use knowledge, but to create
and communicate it.
 Student Library Ownership and Building 87

POTENTIAL MODELS, PAST AND FUTURE

This approach fits neatly with the engaged learning movement, for which
active examples abound. Over the past few years, examples taking this
engagement into the library and emphasizing student ownership have begun
to develop. Three salient examples—the student advisory council, service
learning efforts, and sharing student-created educational resources—share
the common thread of not only emphasizing student creation but sharing it.
By giving students a space in which their voice and their products matter,
students are not simply practicing toward being scholars and workers, but
becoming prepared to interact with the larger cultural commons. This is by
no means an exhaustive list, but rather highlights some ways that libraries
may be able to begin making a Communicative Commons paradigm a reality
in their own institutions.
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Student Advisory Councils

The student advisory council and other efforts to include students in the
administrative side of the library represent a method toward creating owner-
ship of and investment in library resources. Involving student input in library
projects is by no means new. Theorists and scholars of the Information Com-
mons have made clear that student input and support is vital to its success
(Whitchurch, 2010; Bennett, 2003). Multiple projects have made students an
integral part of the planning process for commons projects through needs
assessments. The shape of this needs assessment may be a focus group, sur-
vey, interview, or any of many other techniques for gathering student input
(Lippincott, 2012). However, needs assessment is firmly entrenched at the
beginning of the process, whereas a more communicative approach would
continue to make the student voice a continual part of the institutional con-
versation. This is not to say that needs assessment is not a necessary part
of this process nor an important way to maintain a student voice. Rather, it
suggests that students be partners in research and administration instead of
subjects.
Student advisory councils, student library committees, and projects
which partner with students fill this need. This is not a new idea. It has ap-
peared in libraries as diverse as Texas A&M, Brigham Young University, and
Pennsylvania State University—Schuylkill (Benefield, Arant, & Gass, 1999;
Deuink & Seiler, 2006; Smith & Galbraith, 2011). In fact, Deuink and Seiler,
who were part of the Schuylkill project, have created a manual for colleges
and universities interested in starting up their own councils and committees
(Deuink & Seiler, 2009). The idea behind such a committee or council is
that students are provided with a loud and ongoing voice in the running of
the library to support their needs. For example, the Student Library Advisory
Council at Loyola University has existed for 15 years and become an integral
 88 M. Browndorf

part of their library practice (Pillow, 2007). These case studies show that
the practice of integrated student advice is helpful enough for both students
and libraries that student advisory structures have entered into the routine
of many libraries.
By tying the library’s success to some student decisions one gives own-
ership of these decisions to the students. The library is no longer something
that happens to students, but something that they do. They actively partici-
pate in the making of rule structures and balancing of resources within the
shared resource of the library. As mentioned earlier, when individuals are
responsible for governing a resource through participating in rule structur-
ing, they are more proactive in ensuring the sustainability of that resource
(Ostrom, 1994). Thus, the more students make decisions about the library,
the more they will value the library and feel ownership of the institution and
make decisions that best suit themselves, their peers, and the library as a
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whole.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: DEVELOPING RESOURCES

FOR AND WITH THE LIBRARY

One way to provide students with control over resources in the library
is to involve them in the creation of resources. This type of experiential
learning is seen in many disciplines as a way to apply learning in real-world
scenarios. Experiential learning seeks to engage the student in projects and
scenarios that are either similar to those they will encounter post-graduation
or are indeed the types of projects and problems they will be working
on (Roberts, 2012). Often these projects that students work on provide a
lasting benefit to some community larger than themselves—this is often
called service learning, particularly when it is toward the benefit of the
larger local or global community outside of academia (Riddle, 2003). Integral
to these projects is reflection on the process, both at the end and throughout.
This provides a chance for students to understand the success and meaning
behind the projects.
Experiential learning efforts that serve the library and academic commu-
nity and service learning efforts take many different forms. Wolske from the
University of Illinois has successfully brought students greater understanding
of networked information systems by going into communities with students
and integrating information access into these communities (Wolske, 2013).
Barry blogs from Wright State University at Service Learning Librarian about
her experiences embedding her teaching into service learning projects and
the growth of the library-service learning connection (Barry, 2013).
These efforts show that learning information issues, concepts, and litera-
cies through experience and active participation in the service of something
eventually usable by others is successful. While serving as ALA president,
 Student Library Ownership and Building 89

Kranich, who has long argued that academic libraries can be centers for
building citizenship behavior in students, sent out a call to build service
learning as a way to aid information literacy learning both in students and
in their communities (Kranich, 2000–2001).
However, the work of the Communicative Commons is not only to
build citizenship behaviors, but to encourage communicative behaviors. Ser-
vice learning projects tend to focus on creating projects that are of good to
the whole community, but often students are not included in this community
of potential users. Projects inside the library that have potential lasting effects
on the library or parts of the library better encourage the view of the library
as a commons and better encourage feelings of ownership. Students have
both created and will use the resources. Open.Michigan brings together both
students and faculty to create and share open educational resources (OERs)
(“Open.Michigan: About,” 2013). Anyone is welcome to upload OERs and
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student involvement is encouraged. Furthermore, dScribe acts as a “participa-

tory and collaborative model for creating open content” (dScribe, 2013). This
model was developed not only by faculty, but in partnership with students.
The Peer 2 Peer University, of which Michigan’s model is a part, provides
courses and tools for students to create courses and other educational re-
sources (P2PU, 2013). As information literacy teachers, we must provide
students with the understanding of what it means to be information-aware
today. Such information-sharing projects that are based in academia and not
merely casual interaction with social media can provide students with that
training.
These are not the only example of library-student collaboration projects.
In creating a mobile library app, Cornell partnered with their library student
advisory council and a computer-science class to provide a learning expe-
rience for these students. The students treated the library as if it were a
client of their services. The end result of this project was that the library
has gone back to the same computer science course with another proposal
and hired one of the designers for the maintenance of this app (Connolly,
2011). In response to declining reference services, Illinois Wesleyan similarly
went to a marketing class to ask for assistance. Students created surveys and
provided ideas on marketing, and the use of reference services improved
(Duke, 2009). Working closely with students to make usable resources in
the library was a success both for the library and the students involved.
These are clearly not the only ways that control over library resources
and library decisions can be given to students, but are examples of the ways
that academic libraries have already been creating an environment conducive
to training active student-citizens. Future projects are bounded only by cre-
ativity. They could include projects that collect student knowledge about
their own extracurricular activity structures and make this knowledge avail-
able for use and reuse by fellow groups and their subsequent participants. A
commons renovation project with needs assessment could be created and/or
 90 M. Browndorf

performed by students and with design input from architecture or interior

design departments. There are many other possibilities. This structure allows
the student to think of themselves as active participants in molding a re-
source they use—a task they will continue to encounter as they participate
in the 21st century cultural commons.

CONCLUSION

This article does not in any way argue that we need to stop buying books
and subscribing to databases and instead focus on building up a core of
open-access resources and resources created by students and faculty. Books,
databases, and other materials are imperative to support student creations
and student interaction within the greater knowledge commons. Nor does
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it argue that librarians must give up all of their power and allow students
to completely control the library. Librarians’ specialized training and un-
derstanding of information structures make them the key tool to enabling
student participation in any commons of the library. However, trusting stu-
dents with the opportunity to build and change some of the resources that
they use in the library can better prepare them to interact with information
resources post-graduation by changing the flow of information from vertical
to horizontal to better mimic the shape of the larger Cultural Commons to
which the library is a portal.
The Communicative Commons structure allows this change in
whichever way the librarians, faculty, and students at an institution can
dream through encouraging psychological ownership of the library by stu-
dents. This can be done by giving some control to students and encouraging
feelings of investment—the library’s failure is also the students’ failure and
the library’s success is also their success. Instead of turning a section of the
library into a commons, the Communicative Commons approach has the
ability to turn the whole of the library into a commons, or to create virtual
commons spaces within the library that act as a Communicative Commons,
or to let students make decisions in the planning process of new space
or resource acquisition. These are changes that can be made with fund-
ing, without funding, or with limited funding. They are changes that can
be experienced through small temporary projects in the library or through
a library-wide shift in perception of student ownership and control. The
Communicative Commons is a framework that covers the entire library and
“embrace[s] mutual learning experiences” (Birdsall, 2010, p. 243).
While the shape of these changes is limited only by the imagination
of the individuals making change, ownership must sit at the core. It allows
students to re-think their conception of knowledge as a commodity handed
to them from on high and begin to see knowledge for the messy, dynamic
conversation that it is and prepare them to actively engage in the larger
 Student Library Ownership and Building 91

Cultural Commons. It allows students to truly and completely become en-

gaged, moving from consumers of information literacy education to partners
with librarians in building information resources for themselves and their
peers. It allows them to psychologically own their tools and in doing so, en-
courages students to care for, maintain, and steward their tools in partnership
with librarians.

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