Summary

Our current school library functions as a place to study, check out books either for pleasure or educational purposes, a work area, a lounge for those students who either don't have a sixth or first period, a presentation room for visitors, and a place for both IB and STAR testing. The room does it's best to fit the needs of all the people that need to use it however, due to its lack of room its best just isn't good enough. I know personally that I feel extremely uncomfortable working in the school's library. Not only is the library physically restricting but it’s also mentally restricting because of its lack of creativity in design as well as space.
The school library is currently located in the A-wing which is the first building of the school; this means that this is a place where people get their first impression of the school. If this statement is true then the impression would be that we are unorganized and frozen in time. The library has a main entrance room that includes an executive desk used for checking out books, four rectangular book shelves, three rotating book shelves, and both rectangle and circle tables that sit forty four. This room is quite small and barely obtains the average class comfortably. The library is connected to a reference room that has both computers as well as books. This room is a bit smaller than the main part of the library however it's more functional. It has three rectangular tables with fourteen chairs and people usually tend to work on group projects in here. The final room is the tech room that is strictly for computer use. The layout of this room is awful. The Tech room has three rectangle tables that face the wall with eight computers squeezed onto them. It also contains two book shelves used for easy access storage. The library needs to be a functional place for everyone not only the students but the community as well. We would like to create more rooms that cater to people who are not the typical student because in reality there isn't such thing as a typical student. We need rooms where people can spread out and communicate with one another while being comfortable. When interviewing the students of Mira Loma one similarity in answers kept occurring, basically when the students need to be loud and work with other students around computers they need that to be available to them. However when students need a quiet place to study they would also like that available to them as well. Our librarian is another person who should be taken into consideration when redesigning the library. We would love to incorporate a functional and less depressing office for her as well as a whole room dedicated to storage space not only for books but as well as technology. Last but definitely not least we have to keep in mind the community. We're going to look to see what the current needs of our community members are and be sure to incorporate those as well in our designs. We know for sure that we want a presentation room maybe for parenting classes and meetings. Another idea that we have is maybe expanding the literature selections so that they're more appealing to the community. Something that we need to remember throughout this entire process is that we want to continue on with the classical look yet simply put an urban stamp on it so that all of the generations can be well represented.