Jessica Bendzick/ Winonan

Booking a library study room has changed since last semester in an attempt to improve the reserving system.

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System (MnSCU) started an initiative to help all schools better manage their spaces on campus by creating the Virtual EMS System.

The main confusion among users has come from selecting the correct “group.”

If students are reserving a room for a study group, they should select “individual student” when prompted, librarian Vernon Leighton said. When clubs are reserving a room for a meeting, they should select “student.”

If students do not follow this, Leighton said they could accidentally reserve a group study room for some random club on campus.

Prior to the creation of this system, MnSCU had no way of knowing if universities were effectively using their facilities on campus.

Registrar senior associate Tania Schmidt assisted with creating the new system template and now helps manage it. She referred to the system as a “win-win” for Winona State University.

“We needed a working system, and MnSCU needed a reporting tool so that we could get funding,” she said.

The EMS System might also help Winona State get funding in the future.

With the new system, universities will be able to show MnSCU how they are utilizing their buildings.

“When our institutions seek money for either a new building or a renovation, it is no doubt that the state is going to ask us how we’ve been utilizing our current space. We really had no great way to show them how much we utilize,” Schmidt said. Winona State was looking to get rid of the old room reservation system at the library.

Leighton said there were some possible security problems with the old system.

“I.T. was nervous about the potential for security vulnerability and strongly encouraged us not to use it anymore,” Leighton said.

This system may be new for the library, but not for the campus as a whole. Last year, the EMS System was used for reserving all spaces on campus except for the library.

Now, faculty and students can go to one place to book any kind of room on campus.

Winona State’s EMS System is already somewhere near the 43,000 reservation mark, Schmidt said.

With the old system, students could log in using either their Winona State email address or Student ID library barcode, but with the EMS system, students must use their Star ID.

Darrell W. Krueger Library dean
Thomas Bremer is surprised and pleased with students who are going through the obstacles of operating the new system successfully.

Bremer said there has been a lot of puzzlement and plenty of questions, but said study rooms are one of the library’s most popular resources.