Constantine Murenin Review of Austin Central Library
Views are breathtaking, however, for a brand new f...
Views are breathtaking, however, for a brand new facility, I expected better attention to the details.
They have 3 elevators, one of which is a separately operated staff one that's nonetheless open to the public. The problem is that it has separate buttons to operate on each floor, so, anyone who knows their way around calls both the right two and the left elevator to see which comes fastest. This obviously results in a lot of phantom stops once you do get onto one.
Bathrooms they have doors with mechanical locking handles. Who does that? They also don't have any paper towels (or any accessible or unisex bathrooms), so you can't get out without getting your hands dirty after having to turn the door handle to open the door.
I am also honestly surprised by the doors for the balcony they're supposedly handicapped accessible, but it says push to operate. You basically have to have quite a bit of muscular strength to operate those doors it's just ridiculous! Why not a proper button or sensor that anyone would be capable of using?
Study rooms they call them shared learning, and the smallest one is for 4 people. They don't restrict minimum group size, which is helpful, but it's still disappointing to see that they don't have a plethora of smaller rooms where phone interviews could be conducted. They limit reservations to max 2h, max 1 a day, and max 5 a month, which limits the ability to use these rooms for phone interviews how can you possibly find a job with only one 2h slot for interviews each week on average?! At least the shared learning rooms do have reasonable sound isolation unlike some other libraries.
One nice thing is they do have the patrol enforcing the rules they tell folks not to nap, not to have food, not to put shoes off etc.

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