physicality and libraries

Yesterday I spent some unhappy, downright uncomfortable time in the library. I allowed myself 15 minutes to  check out the 2001 bound volume of RSQ, which has, among other things, Richard Graff's cool article on Aristotle and written style. Twenty minutes should be fine, no? No. I've been retrieving articles from rhetoric journals for years here, and so spatially I know what floor and approximately what shelf they are on--the usual suspects, Rhetorica, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, QJS. They're all proximate to one another because of topic and title. And as far as I can remember, RSQ has been right in there with them. So without bothering to check the call number, I bopped down to floor 3.5 (yep, there's a touch of Being John Malkovich in our stacks), but lo, there was no RSQ.

Long story short, RSQ is now (or was it always?) shelved in the Q section (for oversized stuff--the RSQ newsletter was at one point 8.5 x 11). The Q section is on 2E, the dungeony, musty, not temp controlled, dark depths of the east part of the library. The ceilings there are low--about 6.5 feet--but the doorways are way lower, and the caged lightbulbs hang down, like bats, waiting to graze the head of any person of estimable height (ie me). It sucks to hit your head. So I stoop. As in bend-at-the-waist stoop. It turns out this posture, and the lack of light, makes it nearly impossible to read the call numbers, and so I got lost. Also, stooping while trying to read call numbers puts one at risk for tripping over the large piles of books in the walkways. I felt like I was doing some secret academic obstacle course. (The place is an utter mess thanks, I think, to some book shifting that's going on this summer.) And then? When I finally found RSQ tucked on a shelf next to a caged cubicle that looked like it would be used by Oz of Buffy fame if he decided to go to graduate school to study history, I could not find my way out of the second floor. I took one stairway that led up three flights (half-flights?) to--I kid you not--a sealed wall. It was a little unsettling, and physically just awful. When I got out of there, I was clammy and nauseous, and a little disoriented. And it took much longer than 15 minutes.

Comments

[Nels]

Ohio State has the half floor thing, too. Is it a Big Ten thing?

[dhawhee]

So does Penn State, I think. My guess is that it was standard practice for book storage at the time all these Us broke ground.

[cbd]

The stacks in the old library at Florida were that way, too. The lights were in my field of vision, so I never hit them, but some electrical boxes and other stuff were high enough to miss but low enough to hit. I thought about wearing my bike helmet in the stacks for a while...

[wm]

Many older stacks-banks--Illinois included, I think--were designed without serious thought to public use, since they were to be walked by lonely library employees fulfilling patron requests. (I've heard tales of these folks wearing skates to get the job done faster, and this before the days of bike helmets.)

[dhawhee]

Ah, of course. Thanks, wm. Maybe they wore those nifty cropped leatherish helmets, Amelia Earhart style.

[Danorama]

Ugh--tell me about it. Every time I go into those bottom floors of the east stacks I think I'm going to whack an uncovered light bulb and slash my skull open.

And I just recently had to discover where those Q things where too. It's a shelving nightmare.