Thursday, June 04, 2015

A wave of trauma

is rippling through my Columbia community. The Barnard library is closing for good (it will be reinstituted in a new building), and this means that the Barnard books that we normally are allowed to hold onto for months, indeed years at a time must all be returned to their home! NOooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

(Also, WHERE IS SHKLOVSKY'S THEORY OF PROSE, book #6 on the overdue list?!?)

The more substantive reason that this is a very unfortunate development: Barnard has effectively been the high-quality usable undergraduate collection here. Theoretically Milstein (housed within Butler) should be the undergraduate collection equivalent to the Lamont-Widener or CCL-Sterling situation at Harvard and Yale respectively, but after renovation that collection got dispersed across almost a dozen different reading rooms on different floors, all of them so heavily populated by students as study areas that getting around to get to a specific shelf is a distinctly horrible experience; then, too, the purchasing for Milstein was never sufficient to offer real doubles for essential stuff, and a lot more books only exist in Butler than was my experience at Harvard or Yale. Whereas the Barnard collection has been amazing and also ultra-accessible/user-friendly - alas, no more....

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jenny,

    I'm a librarian at Barnard. I'm glad you like our book collection--holdings and accessibility! We work hard on both.

    I want to make sure you and other professors know that you are welcome to keep your Barnard books during the construction period. You just have to let us know which ones you want to keep. Email library@barnard.edu, and we'll renew them for you through 2019. http://library.barnard.edu/news/library-books-recall

    Jenna

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