COMMENT: Since there are two ‘men’s’ restrooms on the first floor and one ‘female,’ I think it would be beneficial and highly effective to change one into a gender neutral facility. I would much appreciate this on my own accord and I know many of peers have discussed and agreed on the matter as well. Be the change you wish to see Shields. Take the first step in eliminating binaries and providing a safe space for all students! Thank you.

Also, I think that the library should allow students to include a preferred name after their legal name (at least in parenthesis) so that they are called by the name they prefer and not a name they are trying to disassociate themselves from.

ANSWER: This is a great idea and I’m chagrined we didn’t think of it first! We are in the midst of changing over two restrooms to  gender-neutral facilities.  They will most likely be on the 4th floor of Shields Library and the lower level of the PSE Library. Signs and locks have been requested and the Library will be putting this into effect (hopefully) within the next few weeks. The Carlson Health Sciences and Blaisdell Medical Libraries already have gender neutral restrooms in adjoining buildings. As soon as we make the switch over there will be publicity and postings on our web page.

We are also working on changing some aspects of the circulation process so that a user’s preferred name will be incorporated. However, this is an imperfect system. All billing and recalls will fall back to the name by which the student is registered being that this aspect of our operations works via the main campus database. We are working to allow students to edit their own information via the “My Account/Renew Books” page, but it takes some programming and that takes time. In the meanwhile we are changing our policies and doing training. We hope to put this new practice into effect by the end of January.