The emerging trend among some university libraries towards 'information commons' and 'learning commons', has been accompanied by a strong interest in deploying student advisors. However, student advisors can be framed according to two quite different models. One model frames student advisors as first point of contact in a stratified service delivery system. Another quite different model frames student advisors as student mentors by drawing on the long history of SI (supplemental instruction) programs and mentoring programs. Are these different ways of framing Rovers competing or complementary? Or does this double definition of student advisors in Learning Commons in fact accurately represent their ambiguous role and status? This paper aims to tease out for discussion some of the assumptions and implications at issue in these different ways of framing student advisors that have arisen in a pilot implementation of a student rover program in a Learning Commons at Victoria University.

Keywords: learning commons, student rovers, student mentors, communities of learning