Henry: I will try to do a post on that very topic soon

TeePee

As I mentioned in the post, I was (and have remained) ignorant of the history of why Robarts restricts physical access (and thanks to the Tim for providing some of that), the bottom line is, the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University (where I did my undergrad) somehow manage to make it work for both their suburban campuses and their central city locations — one of which is next to one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the developed world. It’s something I’m grateful for and enjoy, on behalf of those who might otherwise not get to access it but who do derive benefit.

Public access says a lot to me — about what the role of education is, who it’s for and who’s entitled to it. For those who might take an interest in U of T’s mandate as a public educational institution, it might be interesting to ask what barriers exist to providing public access and what it might be able to learn from other universities who are able to NOT have turnstiles near the stacks.

Turnstiles at the subway station are another matter altogether.

Kelly library is St.Michæls Collage’s library, and has it’s own rules, as do Trinity and Victoria’s libraries, so you can’t compare them to Robarts.

Literacy with the web and good design is something we learn. And we may wish it weren’t so, but like it or not, the lack of this literacy — and, in the case of the team members who built it, inability to apply this literacy in culturally accepted ways — is a marker of social stratification. And I link again to danah boyd’s work on teenagers and their use of social network sites as an example of looking at the effects of the value judgments we bake into our designs; who we say is good and wanted, and who is not, with what we deem beautiful.