When Do Veterinary Medical Students Study? Understanding Student Study Habits to Inform Library Operating Hours

Erin R. B. Eldermire
Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
erb29@cornell.edu

Abstract

Many libraries have expanded their opening hours to a 24/5 or 24/7 model. But does this reflect when students actually study? Little evidence about when medical or professional students study is available. By mounting a prominently placed poster with a graphical timeline that students could affix self-adhesive dots upon, the Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library gathered students' preferred study times on different days of the week (Monday-Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). The students reported their most active study times as Monday-Thursday between 4:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., peaking at 8:00 p.m., and the fewest study times on Fridays. The poster results informed our decision that it would be of minimal benefit to student users to change library operating hours to a 24/7 model. This user-feedback method can be replicated in a variety of settings to provide quick and easy input to inform library decision-making.

Introduction

The Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library (FSVL), one of 18 unit libraries that comprise Cornell University Library, supports Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), which hosts 149 graduate students, 436 professional students, 251 faculty, and 572 staff, for a total population of 1,408 individuals. The FSVL has 121 seats, and gate counts measure approximately 90,000 visits annually. It is staffed by three support staff (who comprise a full-time-equivalent of 1.75 full time employees), two full-time academic librarians, and eight student assistants who primarily share the responsibility of staffing the circulation desk. Over the last 10 years, during the academic year the FSVL has operated Monday-Thursday 7:30 a.m.-11:00 p.m., Friday 7:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m., Saturday 10:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m. and Sunday 10:00 a.m.-11:00 p.m.

Of the user populations that the FSVL supports, veterinary students utilize the resources and spaces within the library more than any other user group (personal observation). The three most popular resources that the FSVL provides for veterinary students are a large textbook collection that supports student coursework, laptops for loan, and a quiet space with ample tables and carrels to spread out on. In particular, the textbook collection, available via an open reserve system in which multiple copies of required textbooks are held, is an important resource for veterinary students. Although some textbooks are available as e-books through the library, not all are, and for those that students can access, some limit concurrent users. The cost of textbooks for a veterinary curriculum is high. Cornell University estimates a cost of $1,000/year for books and supplies (Cost 2018), as compared to UC Davis' estimated cost of $3,516/year (Cost of Attendance 2018). This discrepancy by program may reflect Cornell University veterinary students' access to the FSVL textbook collection.

The FSVL is not the only place where CVM students can study. The CVM building complex offers an array of amenities that students may use for studying, including a café that serves lunch items, coffee and espresso drinks, and study spaces with tables and chairs in an open atrium and via rooms that house 8-16 people. These spaces are available to the public during regular business hours, and to CVM members 24/7 via keycard access. In addition, members of the CVM are able to use other unit libraries at Cornell University, two of which are 24/5 spaces; the closest of these is a half mile from the CVM building complex, and the other is one mile away.

In 2017 the FSVL Library, which is embedded in the CVM at Cornell University, considered whether to change its operating hours to 24/7. As a part of an extensive project to upgrade its facilities and expand the size of class cohorts, the CVM recently constructed a new learning center, which included a new library space. With this new space, CVM administrators suggested that the library consider opening 24/7 once the library moved into the new building. An important facet of our consideration was whether the students' needs justified this change. However, we suspected that asking students whether they wanted a 24/7 library space would generate largely affirmative responses and would not help us determine whether 24/7 library access would truly serve the needs of the students. In addition, we could not find literature to inform what times of day graduate or professional students study. Therefore, we devised a simple and highly visible assessment to understand student study habits and to help inform the operating hours of the FSVL.

Literature Review

Libraries are continuously adapting policies and practices to best serve the communities that they support, and policies on operating hours are no exception. Many libraries, whether public, academic, or otherwise, have shifted their opening hours later, or have adopted a 24-hour open policy, often referred to as a 24/7 or 24/5 policy (signifying 24 hours, 7 days a week or 5 days a week, respectively). As Laaker (2011) reported, of the 66 Association of Research Libraries members that responded to a survey about library operating hours, 56% either had a portion of their library open 24-hours or remained open 24-hours during finals, 35% had main libraries open 24/7 or 24/5 most of the year, and only 9% reported no 24-hour access at any time of the year.

Expanding library hours into the night and early morning, however, is no small task for many libraries to implement. As Bowman (2013) noted, many unanticipated challenges cropped up when they moved to a 24-hour model, such as difficulty in staffing when a late-night employee was unavailable for work and security challenges in establishing consistent walkthroughs by campus police. Other common challenges include budgetary constraints, custodial shifts, facility adjustments, and concern for security of patrons and of library materials (Laaker 2011; Adeyemi et al. 2013). Other models exist, including swipe-to-access models, in which library patrons can access libraries after hours with an activated key or badge, often to limited spaces (After hours access 2018). These can bring their own challenges, such as users propping open doors or holding doors open for others who are trying to access the building without authorization.

Another consideration is whether the user population of a library and their needs justify an extension of library hours. Studies have shown that late-night usage varies in libraries that are open 24 hours. Chant (2013) reports that on a weekday at 3 a.m. their university library sees an average of 400 to 600 people studying in the library. Johnson and McCallister (2015) found that at Appalachian State University library, where gate counts top 1.2 million visitors annually, headcounts in 2014 fell from 429 at 11 p.m. to 89 at 3 a.m. Bowman (2013), who conducted a survey of five managerial librarians at 24-hour academic libraries, found that in all but one, "the patron numbers, during the time period of 2 a.m. to 7 a.m., appears to be fewer than five patrons for all participants." Clearly, the need for late-night and early-morning access varies depending on the context.

Understanding patron needs should be a first step in considering library operating hours, but few accounts of the time of day that graduate or professional students study are published in the literature. Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rice University were found to do their academic work primarily between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. (Bennett et al. 2005), but these may reflect specific habits or needs of these populations. Some studies focus on the amount of time spent studying. Pychyl et al. (2000) found that 62 undergraduate university students study for a mean of 16-24 hours for an exam in the eight days leading up to the test, and Eliasson et al. (2017) found in a survey of 120 community college students that they spend an average of 2 hours and 41 minutes studying per day. Loyens et al. (2013) found in their study of 106 first-year university students in a problem-based learning curriculum that students reported a mean of 12.86 hours of self-study per week. However, these accounts of amount of time that students spend studying do little to inform at what time of day students study. Therefore, I decided to conduct an assessment to learn more about when veterinary medical students study.

Methods

When considering a shift to a 24/7 operation, I felt it most appropriate to address student study behaviors and student needs to inform our hours of operation. I needed to assess student study habits in a simple and easy way, and I wanted something that veterinary students could easily contribute to. Students at Cornell's CVM are often surveyed, and I wanted to create an assessment tool that would not contribute to survey fatigue. Thus, I created a poster that students might perceive as easy and satisfying to contribute to (Figure 1). This poster, measuring 70" x 48", consisted of 24 columns, each representing one hour of the day, and four rows, one for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Weekdays (Monday-Thursday). This configuration was the result of testing that I did with four prototypes, each which were created on 8.5" x 11" printer paper: one with all days of the week separated out (for seven rows total), a second with Saturday and Sunday combined (for six rows total), a third with Monday-Thursday combined (for four rows total), and a fourth with Monday-Thursday, and Saturday-Sunday combined (for three rows total). Prototype testing was carried out by presenting each to a group of five veterinary students and describing the data that I wanted to gather. Through this testing, the students advised me to create a poster with Monday-Thursday combined (for four rows total), the consensus being that this best reflected student weekly study rhythm, and this relatively simple version would encourage more participation while balancing representative results.

Figure 1: An image of the 70" x 48" poster that veterinary students used to indicate their preferred study times, 24 hours after it was erected.

The poster was erected near veterinary student mailboxes, an area that veterinary students frequent and a central location in the CVM complex. This area, which is not in or near a library space, was targeted because 1) I wanted to get feedback from all students, not just library users, 2) I did not want the students to report their study times only as they correlated with the current FSVL operating hours, and 3) I wanted as many students as possible to see the poster. The poster was put up on May 2, 2017, 19 days before classes ended for the spring 2017 semester. I targeted this end-of-semester time so that I could gather information about student study habits when they were at their peak of studying. I sent an e-mail to all veterinary students with a picture of the blank poster, and an appeal to fill out the poster. The text of the message said, "Dear students, The Veterinary Library wants to learn about you... We want to know when you study! We've made a big poster and put it up by the student mailboxes. Next time you're passing by, we'd love it if you take a minute and use the dots to mark when you study. The feedback that we gather from the poster will inform library policies to support you!" Next to the poster I stapled sheets of dot stickers and reiterated the simple instructions sent via e-mail. Although the dot stickers were available to students in a variety of colors, these colors did not have any deeper meaning. The poster was removed on May 16, 2017, 14 days after it was erected.

Students started placing dots within 30 minutes of when I erected the poster, and many had participated within 24 hours (Figure 1). Once the poster was removed, responses were tallied for each cell.

Results and Discussion

The maximum number of dots in a cell was 26, and with this I can assume that at least 26 students participated, or 5.9% of the Cornell University veterinary student population. Figure 2 shows a graphical representation of the results. The highest study activity was reported on Mondays through Thursdays, during which the most active study times reported were between 4:00 p.m. (18 students) and 11:00 p.m. (16 students), peaking at 8:00 p.m. (26 students). On Saturdays and Sundays, study times were more distributed across the day, peaking at 3:00 p.m. (15 students) and 1:00 p.m. (15 students), respectively. Students reported fewest study times on Fridays, with study hours peaking at 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. (10 students). No students indicated that they study between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. any day of the week.

Understanding library users and their patterns can help drive library policies to best support user needs while balancing budgeting, staffing, safety, and other case-specific limitations and concerns (Ravenwood et al. 2015). Changing demographics, technologies, environments, expectations or other external factors can influence a need to update library policies (Gardner & Eng 2005; Chizwina et al. 2016). Although libraries may consider 24-hour access now more than ever, this shift may be more the exception than the norm. A 2002 study found that the mean operating hours per week of academic libraries was 102.75, well below the 168 hours that a library would be open at a 24/7 operation (Arant & Benefiel 2002), but this study needs updating for changes in the last 16 years.

In the context of the FSVL, the literature is varied and may not apply. Scarletto et al. (2013) found, in their assessment of undergraduate and graduate late-night access to Kent State University Libraries, that "Undergraduate students make up the bulk of late night library users." In an assessment of later library usage, the University of British Columbia found that late-night graduate student library users valued the quiet study space and access to computers and printing (Curry 2003), a finding that was corroborated at Minnesota State University (Lawrence & Weber 2012).

The poster that I created helped to gather and share relevant information about the study habits of an important user population of the FSVL -- veterinary students -- to inform our hours of operation. With it, I found that students study most between 4:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on Mondays through Thursdays, with none reporting studying between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. on any day. With this information, we were able to infer the daily habits of the students that we support, which helped to inform our library operating hours.

An unanticipated outcome of the poster was that results were highly visible and easy to interpret. Students filled cells from the bottom up so that, as feedback was collected, results represented bar graphs; library and college administrators alike could see the unfiltered data unfolding in real time.

Despite its successes, the technique had some drawbacks. I do not know how many students participated, and the number of students who did participate was likely low, and nothing prevented individuals from skewing the results by placing multiple dots in one cell. Although I cannot be sure that this sample does not include non-veterinary students or other individuals, the CVM complex is rarely visited by other students. Geographically, it is located one-half mile from most other campus buildings and amenities. Although that is not a long distance in many contexts, this distance is a barrier in that students from other colleges and programs rarely enter the CVM complex. Furthermore, the location in which the poster was erected was one that veterinary students frequent, but not one that individuals from non-CVM contexts would visit. While the results are most likely representative of the veterinary student population, this cannot be guaranteed.

Another drawback is that this method does not capture the ebb and flow of study behavior over a semester -- I erected this poster during one of the busiest times of the year for Cornell veterinary students, and if I did so at a different part of the semester, I might gather much different information about their study habits. In addition, because the poster combined Monday through Thursday, it is difficult to know how participants interpreted this combination or whether variation between Mondays through Thursdays was properly captured. However, prototype testing helped to minimize interpretation confusion, and given these drawbacks, the information gained still helped to inform an understanding of veterinary student study behaviors.

With this technique, I was able to better understand when veterinary medical students study. Academic libraries can use this simple assessment technique to gather information about when students study to inform their operating hours. Ultimately, as informed by 1) the literature, 2) this assessment and 3) in consultation with CVM administration, we decided that the challenges of maintaining a 24-hour space (such as staffing, budgetary and security constraints), did not warrant a 24-hour operating policy at this time. Instead, we have continued with our current hours of operation.

Acknowledgements

I thank Chris Dunham for her artistic contribution of creating the poster and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript.

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