One of St. Joseph County Public Library’s (SJCPL) branches has recently reopened after renovations. The Centre Branch is on the corner of Kern Road and Miami Street in South Bend. One of the features that was renovated was the study rooms. Just like every other college student, I need to study in order to pass my classes. I booked out a room to see how unique of a study space it was.
On SJCPL’s website, you are able to reserve rooms including study rooms. Multiple branches have study rooms, including Centre. Since I have reserved a study room with SJCPL in the past, I found the interface to be easy to use. The time boxes are a little bit confusing to use, but that is probably because I sometimes jump into things without thinking. When booking online, you can reserve a study room for two hours.
You then receive a message that has a code in it, which is used to unlock the door to the study room. Unfortunately, when I went to study, the code wasn’t working, so I asked a librarian to let me in. However, this is a very promising feature that I can’t wait to see in the future.
There are three study rooms at Centre that have the same layout: a wooden table, 4 chairs and a TV. When booking a room, you can request a HDMI cord or a mobile white board. I didn’t use these features as my study plan didn’t involve those tools, but they are available if needed. The chairs weren’t the comfiest, nor were they terrible to sit in. I think they are great seats for when I need to lock in.
Something that I liked about the rooms is that there is a tinted stripe at eye level on the windows into the library. I am a person who has “Squirrel?” moments constantly, and I appreciate that I can have those moments without making awkward eye contact with a random person trying to look at books. Unfortunately, the windows looking into the courtyard don’t have the tint, so I think that awkward eye contact is very likely to happen.
The rooms aren’t noise-proof, so if you aren’t wearing headphones, you might hear what is happening outside of the room.
Overall, I think the rooms are solid. I will give them a 4.5 out of five stars. I will be using these rooms from now on.
If you don’t live in the area covered by the St. Joseph County Public Library, other library systems in the area also have study rooms. I didn’t check every single one, but Mishawaka, LaPorte County, Elkhart and Niles have study rooms. The only one that didn’t have study rooms on their website was the Goshen Library.
