Student or Book Bandit?

Entering the library can be a semi-daunting venture—first there’s the sheer willpower required to get you there, then you must have your ID in hand and your mind geared to working, or at best, not to sleeping—but exiting is a downright harrowing, time-consuming experience. Before you are allowed to return to the lively world outside the somber library, the book-checkers force you to open each pocket of your (often multi-pocketed) bag to look for library materials. The recent announcement of a pilot program to keep Lamont open 24 hours a day shows that the Harvard College Library (HCL) system is attempting to serve student needs. Yet one student need that HCL has continued to neglect is the need to get out of the library, quickly and without a hassle—that is, without the time-consuming and fruitless cavity search.

Although some consider the search a minor nuisance not worth the trouble to repeal, small comforts can greatly increase the benefit students reap. The relatively minor renovation of the fifth floor of Lamont transformed it from a barren studying-Siberia deserted by students to a flourishing study space.

Once a viable safeguard for library books, this antiquated search is now an ineffective and unnecessary hassle. Even the most zealous and thorough guards cannot catch everything—all one would really have to do is place a book underneath a few notebooks to get away with their treacherous book-stealing scheme. It’s such a shame. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had the space-age technology to automate the check and detect the exit of hidden library materials not yet checked out?

Oh wait, we already have magnetizers and sensory gates at each exit.

Answering as to why there remains a need for a door check despite having a magnetization system, a student librarian said, “in case a book, CD, video, or piece of equipment has been missed for some reason or other in the magnetization process, the guard is there to discover the mistake”—when they can. Even the director of communications for the libraries Beth Brainard admitted that, “this isn’t the ultimate security check.” In rare cases, the guards triumphantly recover an overdue book from the hands of a student anxiously scrambling to finish a late paper. Most of the time, though, the checker is just slowing people down. HCL could easily eliminate all of this by magnetizing all books and bothering only students who have overdue books, saving money on a 24-hour checker and saving students some frustration. Long lines often form at the door as the guard examines bags of books, one at a time, looking for a rogue, unmagnetized book that is hardly ever there.

Although the library is rightfully devoted to its books—it even has an 800-number for wet book emergencies—the library needs to eliminate one of its last barriers to becoming student-friendly. The library tries “to balance the rights and privacy of our users with the safety of our collections,” according to Brainard, yet such an ineffective search does little to justify the irksome intrusion on students. With the current attention on the libraries serving student needs, students need to let the libraries know that the unnecessary searches encroach on their time and privacy.

Evelyn Lilly ’07, a Crimson editorial comper, is a biology concentrator in Mather House.