For a few years, there used to be three separate desks near the entrance to the library at Pace’s Pleasantville campus: the Circulation desk, where students could check-out and return books, the Reference desk, where students could receive research help for their essays and other assignments, and the Technical desk, where students could receive simple technical help and rent out laptops and headphones. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 academic year, though, the library went from having three desks to two, and where the technical desk used to be, there is now a wooden stand with some potted plants inside. So, what happened to the desk?

Even though the desk’s physical location was eliminated, the services that it offered to students (light technical support, borrowing laptops and headphones), have not gone anywhere. They just moved their services to the Circulation desk, closer to the library’s entrance. According to Rose Gillen, director of the library, during the summer, library staff realized that it did not really make sense to pay one student sitting at the technical desk and possibly another two students sitting at the circulation desk to essentially perform the same duty of circulating items; whether they were books or electronics.

“[The library] merged the two desks, because their function was really to just circulate items, and that is really what drove the decision,” Gillen said.

Anyone who works in the library, student or staff, is still trained to answer simple tech questions that students might have.

“The students who work here, we do try to train them to answer basic questions, because we don’t like to send students up to [I.T. support in] Willcox, when we can help them here,” Gillen said.

And if the problem is too technical or advanced for the library staff to answer on their own, students still may not have to go up to Willcox, as the library has a “tech guru” of their very own, Eric, who is in the library from Monday thru Friday until 4 p.m.

Even though the library does not have advanced technical support for students during the evenings or weekends, students can go to the Computer Resource Center, located on the second floor of Willcox Hall, for technical support. The center is open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday, and from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. on the weekends.

According to Gillen, students should not expect any major changes to happen within the library during either next semester or the next academic year.