Library zoning for dummies: discovering the new library study spaces at Royal Holloway

What can you learn when you open a new library building? Many things. But those who have experienced moving their library (or libraries) to a new building may also say: expect the unexpected. We would think that any new lesson learnt in the process would be focused around something that we didn‘t know about at all or some advanced knowledge that we haven‘t yet discovered. In our case, we didn‘t expect that something as unexpected as library zoning, and users‘ expectations around it, would shake up our idea of what we thought we knew about our students. And this is what exactly happened, but let‘s start from the beginning.