Trinity’s newly-recruited team of student desk monitors will begin patrolling College’s libraries tomorrow.
In an email to all staff and students, Peter Dudley, the Library’s Head of Reading Room Services and Space, stated that “a dedicated team wearing blue t-shirts will patrol Library reading rooms to free up study spaces that have been unoccupied for more than 60 minutes”.
The library website states that leaflets will be left at study spaces observed to be unattended, indicating the time at which the study space was observed to be unoccupied and the time at which it will be cleared should the student fail to return within the allotted 60-minute period.
The website goes on to say that should belongings be left unattended for more than 60 minutes any books and belongings left at the study space will be cleared to a box and moved to a designated storage area on the same floor.
The desk monitors will operate in the Berkeley, Lecky, Ussher, Hamilton and John Stearne Medical libraries
The library have introduced the measure in order to deal with what they describe as the “the perennial issue of ‘desk-hogging’”, whereby students leave their belongings unattended at one of the desks in the library study spaces, in order to reserve the space for themselves for long periods of time.
The library have previously described this issue as “a significant source of frustration for students preparing for exams”.
Desk monitors will work between 10 and 12 hours per week in two hour shifts in the remaining lead up to the Christmas exam period. They will be used next year in the weeks preceding the Summer exam period.
