The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper
27th May 2019
Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.
I guess ‘Bass Library’ is the sold-naming-rights incarnation of what we used to call Cross Campus Library. The major problem with that library was (and maybe still is) that it was impossible to ‘study’ there because of all of the people socializing. The only times I ever entered that library as an undergraduate was when forced to check out reading materials for a course, which had to be done there. The best place actually to study was one of the graduate student carrels in the stacks of Sterling Memorial, because they were all under window embrasures (so they had excellent light), they had a comfortable (but not too comfortable) chair and small table, and it was DEAD QUIET. The effect was that of being in a medieval monastic scriptorium.