There ever lethargic Stevareeeno M. Cohen 😉 writes in with an article from the Daily Northwestern. It is about the local public library versus the school’s library.
In his four years at Northwestern, Weinberg senior Jeremy Weissmann said he has visited the Evanston Public Library only once.
“Twice, if you count voting,” Weissmann said.
I loved it there…
Evanston has a great public library (actually of all the places I’ve lived it is my favorite), I used it a fair amount as a student and constantly when I was working at Northwestern. Of course, I read fast enough I could read books for fun even as a student, which I guess some of these folks can’t.
It’s nice that a student newspaper is talking about libraries, though I don’t really think most people would see the local public library as competing with an academic research library for the same users (for study space maybe, but research??).
Booze ‘n’ libraries
“I remember I was there for an interview and I had one too many glasses of wine, and I circled three times before I could find the exit,” Larson said.
I wonder if she got the job?
Re:Booze ‘n’ libraries
I honestly don’t know if she got the job, but the circular stacks can make you dizzy even without the booze. The carpet color leading from the entrance to the center of the room is a different color than the rest of the room. I don’t know if people pick up on that or not. Of course the carpets are pretty ugly in that 70’s way, so who wants to look down?
dizzy towers
Don’t forget the rest of the decor, we always referred to the dominant colors as brack and greige — sounds like nothing has changed. The carpets were always bizarre, though a useful way of remembering which tower you were circling aimlessly in.
The first time I was wandering around in the library I almost got stuck in one of the stairwells in the towers. I’m one of those weirdos who prefers stairs to elevators and I was in the tower with the student lounge and media center in it. I went down to that level and the door was locked. It was rather disconcerting. Luckily when I scrambled back up a floor, the other doors were open but it was a very creepy experience and it kept me out of the stairwells for about a year.
It’s sort of frightening to think that the decor hasn’t changed all that much since the mid 80s when I was a student (I worked there until 1995).
Re:Booze ‘n’ libraries
I wish my job interviews were like this! I could totally ace the “get drunk and find an exit” test as opposed to the traditional faculty presentation.
Oh, the memories!
I lived 2 blocks from NU’s campus when I was in library school (not at NU) in the early ’90s, and I’d use their library to do my work for ref classes. During finals, the library was open only to NU students, so I’d tell the door attendant I needed to use the gov docs depository collection (usually a lie), and they’d let me in.
The new Evanston PL building opened after I moved to another burb. I went there once when I was back in Evanston for something; very nice, but the interior signage was done in some looks-over-readability art deco font.
Re:Oh, the memories!
*laugh* I worked in the Government Publications and Maps Department at that time, though I was usually upstairs supervising the rarely-used but quite nice map collection. I’m surprised the gate staff didn’t watch to see if you went back to the government publications department…though I guess they really didn’t care.