Stacks and stacks and stacks

I started work this week at the university library and am really enjoying it so far. The librarian that I'm working with, Merinda Hensley, is in charge of library instruction, so I'm helping her with several teaching projects this summer and working about 20 hours per week. On my first day of work I discovered that Merinda and I are kindred spirits. How could I tell? We are reading the same book at the same time! Merinda took me out to lunch, we started talking about food, and I mentioned that I'm almost finished with Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/) and Merinda said, "Me too!" So we had an instant bond.

My current work project is an annotated bibliography of books on writing to help doctoral students who are stalled on their dissertations. Yesterday I went searching in the stacks to find the books on the list. The stacks are a very scary place: ten decks of books, low ceilings, very little lighting, half-floors, and tricky compact shelving. I've heard that some librarians take sticky notes into the stacks with them in order to find their way back out -- kind of like a bread crumb trail. I didn't get lost and I found most of the books I was looking for, so I would call my first experience in the stacks supremely successful. :)

The university library is a really interesting place. The building was completed in 1926 and has been added onto about a half dozen times, and it is NOT one cohesive whole. In fact, it's sort of a mess of half-floors and dead-ends and staircases that lead nowhere. You may think I'm joking, but I'm not. The main stacks hold approximately 10 million volumes. It's hard to imagine, isn't it? (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/administration/collections/collections/libhistory.htm) Housed inside the main library are a whole bunch of departmental libraries, including an English Library, Education Library, Newspaper and History Library, and many more. Unlike most academic libraries (75% of academic libraries in the U.S. use Library of Congress cataloging), the UIUC library uses the Dewey Decimal system, which I read about today in the Library and Information Science Library. (It was quite a fascinating read.) The interesting thing about using the Dewey Decimal system in a library as big as UIUC's is that numbers get extremely long. For example: 808.0420711N176I. OK, maybe "interesting" is a stretch. But I'm going to be a librarian! I love this stuff!

The (underground) undergraduate library, from the courtyard

I work at the main library, where undergraduates are not allowed to go into the stacks. They have their own little library and the two libraries are connected by an underground tunnel. The undergraduate library was built completely underground so that it would not block sunlight to this test field that grows on the quad and has been growing there since 1876.

The campus is huge. I decided to go find the Library and Information Science building, where most of my classes will be held in the fall. It's a huge brick building a couple of blocks away from the main library.

Isn't it gorgeous? I think I'll learn really well in such a lovely building. :)