In fall 2003, Mt. Holyoke, an elite, largely undergraduate liberal arts college with a student population of roughly 2000, unveiled its take on the information commons. Located in an area known as Miles-Smith 4, the commons functions as a conduit between the main library and Dwight Hall, which houses the library offices, state-of-the-art media labs, and computer workshops. As late as last year, this area, with its open space and banks of windows, in the words of Mt. Holyoke officials, was "underutilized": it housed shelves of scientific journals. Today the space teems with students dispersed among more than 50 high-end computers, including three large flat screens for group instruction. Of course, when the Miles-Smith addition was built just 13 years ago, the Internet and e-journals did not exist at MHC. At Mt. Holyoke another key aspect of the information commons model emerges. A library by any other name is still a library. The information commons is in reality a new edition of the campus library, one that necessarily supports both the information and the media with which that information has now become fused. Students today at the MHC library borrow everything from books to digital cameras. They get reference help, assistance navigating electronic databases, or technical instruction on how to do a Power Point presentation. A student at MHC can find the information resources, the equipment, and the instruction to use it all in the library. Socked by a virus with your paper due in a day? The information commons can help. "I have a student in there right now doing a Windows restore," says Marc Boucher, nodding over his shoulder to the diagnostic center, based in the commons. "It crashed, so she had to go back to the beginning and format the machine from scratch. But first we had to save all of her previous work in DOS." The center is yet another example of meeting student needs all under the library roof. Boucher, co-coordinator of lab operations in the Department of Technical Support and Repair, says it is not uncommon for upwards of a half-dozen machines to be worked on at one time. At Mt. Holyoke, and at campus libraries nationwide, the current challenge is to expand continually what we think of when we think of library services and to break those services outside of library walls