Blogs > Cliopatria > History Bloggers and Empty Libraries

May 15, 2005

History Bloggers and Empty Libraries


by Cliopatria


Everyone will have links to these articles today. So why shouldn't I?

The New York Times giveth...

And the New York Times taketh away....

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Caleb McDaniel - 5/15/2005

I'm just getting a hilarious vision of the sinister villain, not pulling the trigger or tightening the noose, but pushing the button on a library shelf while laughing maniacally.

They should put this in the next edition of "Clue." "Colonel Mustard, killed in the library, with a moving shelf."

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 5/15/2005

I think our DB would have to have had his last cup of coffee at a faculty meeting in which he had pushed an unpopular vision of curriculum reform...or had otherwise antagonized the administration....

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 5/15/2005

Gack! Ack! I'm having little flutterings of panic at the thought of it...I can't watch that scene in Star Wars. I was recently working in a library where the moving stacks are still completely manual...you actually have to check before you move the shelves. I always worried I'd be tracking down some article (this was periodical shelving), and someone after some silver in a Sotheby's catalogue would smoosh me...

Sharon Howard - 5/15/2005

Write it into the mystery... but it would turn out in post-mortem that it wasn't the kind of coffee served in the library coffee shop - and all would hinge on where our victim had been drinking his coffee...

Um, sorry. I've been watching too much CSI.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/15/2005

Oh, I regularly come very close to giving up this blogging thing myself, when the posts I spend days (sometimes months) thinking through go uncommented and unlinked, and the little "link-and-comment" (ahem) and political asides get dozens. On the other hand, once those things are up, I can refer back to them, like footnotes to my own thinking, and sometimes an old post gets noticed when I say "I said..." It still stings. It's supposed to be a discourse, an exchange, a grand public discussion, and nobody wants to be the guy in the corner muttering to himself....

Lisa Roy Vox - 5/15/2005

Yes, I always tempt fate by sitting in the middle of the aisle of those contraptions while I browse through books....it conjures up frightening images reminiscent of the scene in the original Star Wars (yes, I'm getting in the spirit for the third episode) when Luke, Leia, etc. are in the giant trash compactor slowly being compressed.
But more often than not, the opposite happens...the darn shelves won't move because some invisible object is blocking the sensor.

Caleb McDaniel - 5/15/2005

But if I had to go by being crushed by a mobile shelf, I would certainly have wanted a cup of coffee to be my last meal.

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 5/15/2005

Yikes! Stop horrifying me! I have nightmares about those monile shelving units...the church history section in Widener uses them and I am always terrified someone even more desperate than me to locate some good old-fashioned theological tome will accidently crush me...

Sharon Howard - 5/15/2005

And even if we don't, somebody will just *have* to write it into a campus murder mystery...

Ralph E. Luker - 5/15/2005

I see no good at all in these developments. Four years ago, I was astonished when I found that the University of Virginia had installed a coffee shop in the main lobby of the main library. I happily made use of it, however, and have to admit that being able to munch discretely while I was sitting at the microfilm reader did allow me to do research without interruption. Even so, where there are cookie crumbs and apple cores, the mice and rats cannot be far behind. And those dreadful expandable mobile shelving units. Mark my word -- someday we will find a dead body stashed away in one of those rarely used mobile units -- probably in a section reserved for government documents.

Oscar Chamberlain - 5/15/2005

Lisa,

I suppose its "misery loves company" but its good to know that others are frustrated when their favorite posts languish.

By the way, I love the line "No books will be displaced in the course of the construction." It reminds me of the tag at the end of films today about no animals having been harmed. Perhaps a "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Books" will start inspecting library remodellings to make sure that the books are not cramped into too small a space and that they get some time out in the light periodically.

Lisa Roy Vox - 5/15/2005

I can sympathize with Greenberg. My favorite posts go unnoticed, but a blog I did about the history of the concept of memes and my dislike for bloggers' memes earned me my most linkbacks yet and my first public thrashing on a completely random site. And of course, it was a bit like my 5 lb Maltese dog taking on a Doberman. But I can't imagine actually desiring 50 replies, never mind my ego. I'd never get my dissertation done.

Oh and Emory is getting actual baristas in its library (I believe "baristas" is the plural, but only b/c that's how they refer to themselves at Romenesko's Starbucks Gossip). This summer a coffee shop will be constructed on the first floor of our main library. Not Starbucks though. I believe it's called Jazzman's? Does that trump the UT-A article? Maybe, maybe not. No books will be displaced in the course of the construction. At any rate, Emory is installing those expandable, movable shelves to make room for even more books.
Between the coffee shop and my dissertation study, I really won't ever have to leave the library.