Let the Libraries Alone

Sprawled throughout the University are eighty separate libraries, enough to keep one man busy merely trying to remember where they all are. For years the sheer number of these libraries and the money involved in running them has been goading the Administration into studying budgets and maps of the University. In all its plans, the University seems to be considering two questions: which libraries cost the most and which can be moved into Widener without making people walk too far. And after pondering these two questions it has come up with a proposal to carry the Social Relations and Philosophy libraries, both only a long leap from Widener, into the main stacks. There are, however, better reasons for leaving these two libraries in Emerson Hall.

The most important is that these departmental libraries allow undergraduates to browse around from shelf to shelf, a privilege few are granted in Widener. This random book searching is a valuable part of an undergraduate's education since in a departmental library he has all his specialized volumes centered in one room. If the social relations library moved into Widener, with its old classification system which slits the field into anthropology, psychology, and sociology, books now on one Emerson Hall shelf would be scattered on three different Widener floors.

Among the many minor inconveniences the proposed merger would cause, is the loss of a between classes study place. Now, in this period, students can step into a library, pull a book from the shelf and spend an hour or two on it. Without the divisional library he would have a choice of either taking a chance at Widener's front desk, with a fifteen minute wait, or going off to Lamont, with an incomplete collection. Radcliffe students, who now spend much of their time in the Emerson libraries, would not even have this alternative.

There is a further advantage in the specialized library--its librarian. She is usually an invaluable aid to a department, since she keeps track of new books, informing the faculty and students of their release. And if a book happens to be out, a divisional librarian provides more than a pink slip; she is able to tell exactly who has the book and where he lives, a service which has rescued many a harried thesis-writer.

In short, a departmental library's specialization and the personal services it provides transcend consideration of location and finance, especially since the departments are willing to continue paying for them out of their own budgets. Although there are probably a few of those eighty libraries which the University can centralize without much inconvenience to students the Social Relations and Philosophy collection should remain just where they are.