Lamont Announces New Hours for Exam Period

Yiclding to increasing student demand, librarians will keep Lamont library open until midnight every weekday and from 2:00 p.m. until midnight on Sundays throughout the reading and exam periods, Keyes D. Mctcalf, Director of the University Library, announced yesterday.

Starting next Friday, the library will, be open two more hours a day Monday through Friday. Although Saturday hours are not changed, Lamont will open for ten hours every Sunday. This is the first time since the opening of the library in 1949 that it has been made available for use on Sundays.

Desk 3 to Stay Open Later

Emphasizing that the changes will only affect Lamont and not the other branches of the University Library, Philip J. McNiff, director of Lamont, said that the new hours are being tried in response to "requests and demands by undergraduates that the library close later."

Students can still check out reserve books at 9:00 p.m., but desk three, where closed reserve books are housed, will stay open until midnight. The only facilities that Lamont will close at 9:00 p.m. are the Woodberry Poetry Room and the reference room service desk. Although the library will open each of the five Sundays in the reading and exam period, reserve books which are checked out Saturday afternoons will continue to be due Monday morning.

Library officials are not considering a change in the time that reserve books are due, in spite of demands by some student organizations to move the time when reserve books are due up till 10:00 a.m. Also no change is planned in the overtime fine system.

Both Metcalf and McNiff refused to estimate how much it will cost to keep Lamont open an additional 20 hours a week. "No doubt the costs will be high, but we are trying to make these changes as inexpensively as we can without cutting down on the quality of service which the student body expects," McNiff added. Most of the costs, however, will come from maintenance charges and not from wages