The Nation's First Undergraduate Library Turns 50

This comparison conjures up images of Radcliffe women adorning the study carrels in both libraries-but is a bit inaccurate since women were not allowed in until 1967.

In the Harvard Library Bulletin of winter 1949, the library director defended the decision to exclude women.

"Experience here and elsewhere has shown that a library for men only or for women only can be administered with almost no supervision in the reading rooms, but that a coeducational library requires supervision if reasonable quiet is to be preserved," Metcalf wrote.

"The staff would have to be doubled if adequate reading room supervision were to be provided on a coeducational basis," he continued.

Fifteen years later, in 1966, the majority of Harvard students were still opposed to allowing women into Lamont.

In a poll conducted in January 1966 by the Harvard student government, 62 percent of those polled voted to exclude women entirely; 19 percent voted to allow women inside only weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and 19 percent voted to admit women at all times.

But things changed after female undergraduates were allowed to use Lamont for two weeks in the fall of 1966 during the construction of the new library for women, Hilles Library in the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

Afterwards, Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford '48 announced that the administrators had determined that use of the library by women did not pose any serious problems. His announcement sparked a spirited controversy, with letters to the editor back and forth persuading Lamont to let women in or "keep the girls out."

In the fall of 1967, the debate was ended when women were allowed permanent access to Lamont.

Current Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73 recalls being in the first class allowed to use Lamont for all four of her undergraduate years. For her, she says, the issue did not spark political embitterment as it did for some.

"[The idea of exclusion from Lamont] was very amusing to us, and did not loom particularly large as a significant barrier, just another of those annoying little things that showed that we were really 'guests' and not entitled to the run of the place, as our male classmates were," she says.

Traces of the old limits, however, still lingered after the library was opened to women.

"The biggest annoyance...was that there wasn't at that point a restroom we could use," Lewis says. "So here we were, able to use the stacks, go to sections, but not use a bathroom."

Cole says that though the resistance may have been slow to fade, today it has become obsolete.

"I don't think the opposition to women was something that was going to disappear overnight. I think the passage of time has shown people that there were no disadvantages to having women in the library," she says.

"By the 1970s, no one even knew [women had ever been barred]. It was a belief in the established way being that way because it was the correct way."

Open Ears

In recent years, the volume of student feed-back has multiplied, and Lamont is listening.

"I get much more of a sense of ownership of Hilles and Lamont from students now than I did when I started," Cole says.

A wave of changes swept the library in the '80s and '90s, including bar codes on books, consolidation of electronic catalogs under the Hollis Plus on-line system, computer access, carpeting of the reference room, the opening of the government documents and microfilm room on the first level, the Center for Students with Disabilities and the new language resource center on the sixth floor.

Perhaps the following passage, taken from the Jan. 15, 1949, Harvard Alumni Bulletin, best sums up the differences between Lamont then and now:

"[The student] sits down, opens to a passage, smokes a cigarette, reads another passage as he smokes, gets up and crosses the room to one of the five sound-proofed typing cubicles. He has his portable with him."

In addition to the absence of smoking rooms and the considerably reduced number of type-writers, the cataloging system has also seen a few changes since 1949.

As they saw their library improving, undergraduates began to take a greater interest in it.

In response to the increased number of student suggestions, the Lamont administration began to conduct surveys in the early '90s. Most of the changes in the past two decades, says Cole, have resulted from student input.

For example, in 1989, the first carpeting was installed in Lamont, in the third floor reference room in response to persistent student complaints about the noisy floors.

"In one stroke, Mr. Lamont's interest in and care for the library will eliminate the single most persistent irritant in the lives of hundreds of students," Cole told the Alumni Bulletin at the time.

The changes this summer, Cole says, will reflect students' wishes as well.

Over the past year, Lamont employees have conducted an occupancy study, observing where students choose to sit and how they arrange themselves in relation to others.

What they found, according to Cole, is that "students choose first places like carrels, small study tables, and the comfortable chairs in the Farnsworth Room."

The third floor reading room's new furniture, she says, will include more individualized study space in lieu of the long group study tables that have occupied it since 1949.

"It's documented that people have boundaries," Cole says. "There's no point in putting six seats at a table when people always sit two seats apart."

She says the change reflects a change in the way people study. "We like more personal study spaces," she says of contemporary students-but also the correction of a long-standing problem.

"Those long tables? I don't think they ever worked," she says.

The reading room's new lighting will also reflect student feedback, Cole says.

"When the only lights are coming from 16 or 18 feet, people psychologically feel like they're not getting enough light," she says.

And so, the uniform lighting that made the library's original proponents so proud will also be retired, in favor of a variety of different lighting solutions, including conventional ceiling lights, lamps, and pendant lights hanging from the ceiling.

Other planned amenities designed for student convenience and comfort include a limited number of laptop loges in the third floor reading room and armchairs with footrests.

Eyes on the Future

Cole says she expects that the range of functions for which students can use computers will continue to grow. For an introduction to these functions, she says, students will need the help of trained staff so that librarians can serve as teachers.

"Most students who are good with computers whiz in and whiz out, and it's only when you get stuck that you turn around and find there's someone there," Cole says.

"It's our role as librarians to be interpreters, to be teachers of that kind of learning resource," she adds.

And with the increased number of functions available to students in the library, Cole says, Lamont will become more of a one-stop shop for students.

"Amazingly enough in the age of electronics, more and more people are voicing an interest in the library as a place," she says.

Just to name a few, the resources available at Lamont currently include computers, copy machines, study space, social space, telephones and bathrooms.

The one thing missing for the studying student, it seems, is food.

"Cafe Lamont was frequently the number one thing for [students who responded to the survey]," Cole says.

But because of a lack of space, she says, that cafe is unlikely to materialize anytime in the future.

Moreover, Cole says the amount of man-hours necessary to keep the food sold in such a caf from migrating into the stacks is prohibitive.

"I just can't see investing staff time in telling people they can't take food into the library," she says.

Fond Memories

Undergrads past and present remember Lamont as more than just a place to check out the reserve reading, and say it will be etched in their memories as a significant component of their college days-but the reasons are different for each person.

"When [students] fell asleep reading their book[s] you could turn their pages back," writes undergraduate prankster Dean Masouredis '74. "When they awoke you would see if they remembered where they had been or if they would re-read the material again."

Brian Wescott '84 recalls listening to his Shakespeare readings on vinyl LPs to decrease study time. "Because Shakespearean actors enunciate so clearly, I could play the records at 45 rpm and get through them even faster," he said.

"The best part about Lamont for me as a senior," Emily R. Sadigh '99 writes, "has been how much it has been a center for reunions with friends I met my first year."

After all the hubbub about architecture and exclusion, Lamont Library has emerged an essential part of undergraduate life at Harvard. As a prophetic Crimson writer recognized in 1949, "Lamont Library is here to stay."