Tales from the MIT Libraries

Introduction

For nearly two years, I worked at Hayden Library at MIT. It was a great job, one that I really enjoyed, mostly because I liked working with the cool staffers there. They were all extremely clueful, patient, and forgiving, and I wish to thank them for the wonderful experience that I had.

So what, exactly, added that extra dimension to my job? Was it the experience of handling all those masterpieces of technical knowledge? Was it my burgeoning ability to find those things that would enhance my own research? Was it the free food that was leftover from all those library conferences? Well, yes, but more than any of those, the patrons of the library provided my most memorable experiences. This page is dedicated to them and all others who seek knowledge in the world's libraries and archives.

The MIT Libraries: Your home away from home

When I began working at Hayden in September of 1994, the library was open 24 hours to MIT students. Of course, at a place like MIT, the students availed themselves of the privilege to a remarkable extent. Sleep-deprived grad students slaving on their theses, undergrads with noisy roommates or imminent deadlines on term papers, all would settle down in the library until 2, 3, or 4 in the morning...often later. Many simply never left, sleeping on two large cushioned chairs pushed together, eating their meals from the vending machines in the basement outside (or sneaking in whole bags of groceries!).

It was in these days that I used to stack books in the basement at 8am. Of all the places in the library, the basement was the most deserted. A couple of tables were buried deep within the stacks, where a few diehards liked to work. I was constantly afraid I'd find either a dead body or used condoms, and I was never sure which I dreaded more. (As it turned out, I never found either.) Once I found someone's retainer, sitting on the desk. Another morning I found an entire 2L bottle of diet Pepsi, unopened. I often found bags of food, candy wrappers, plastic drink containers, cans, half-eaten apples, boxes of pizza, or sometimes even dirty plates and utensils, despite the ban on food and drink in the library.

One morning another staffer, Alison, and I were preparing to stack journals back on the shelves. She went out to a nearby table, where it was easier to put them in order...and came back almost immediately. I asked her what was wrong, and she exclaimed, "There is someone sleeping UNDER that table!" I had a look. There, under the table, was a young man, sound asleep. Laughing, she went to the circulation desk to tell the other staffers.

Suddenly, the table was ringed by curious librarians. My supervisor leaned over and looked at him, and said, "Sir, are you all right?" He woke and saw that he was surrounded, then got out from under the table, as she requested. Once he was seated, he put his head on the table and went back to sleep. It was clear that he was not getting any work done, so we did not understand why he did not simply go home to his nice, comfortable (?) Institute bed and sleep there. He had clearly thought that he would not be bothered if he slept under the table.

For tired patrons to sleep in the library is not at all unusual, even now that it is no longer open 24 hours. Indeed, the problem may well be worse now; for at closing time when the desk staff goes around to ask patrons to leave, a common response from sleepers is, "Oh, no! What time is it?" They are frequently dismayed that their studies for the evening have not been completed and sometimes plead for more time to do a few last photocopies or find those last necessary journal articles.

For those homeless patrons, many of whom are actually former students who for some reason are unable to physically leave the Institute, this is the time to leave the library for the night to bed down in some of the other open buildings on campus, until the library reopens in the morning. For these people, the library may literally be home. They spend their days reading miscellaneous journal articles, newspapers, and magazines. One particularly infamous person likes to gather large quantities of materials and build little walls with them on the table, then leaves a little note requesting us not to reshelve the books while he's gone. Throughout the day the staff removes piles of these books and reshelves them, whereupon he goes and gets more. I wonder what subject he received his Ph.D. in.

A source of knowledge for those who seek

I began working at the circulation desk in the summer of 1995. It was then that I began to discover that some people do expect a librarian to be able to do more than check in and out books, place holds, and help them find what they are looking for. One woman, for instance, came in requesting help on a mechanics problem for her freshman physics course. (Her confusion involved taking the sine of the angle, rather than the cosine.) She was not the only person who came to the desk asking for help with her homework, either. I've had people come to ask for help in differential equations, C programming, psychology papers, and many subjects on which I haven't a clue. Occasionally, however, I would be asked a question on which I could actually be of help.

One evening, a man called the circulation desk. "Hello," he said to me. "I'm calling on my cell phone from Dallas, Texas, and my son needs some help on his chemistry homework." It turns out that he had heard about the Smoot marks on the Harvard Bridge and wanted to know the full story.

One caller became rather irate when I was unable to satisfy his request. The call went something like this:

     Me:      Hayden Circulation, may I help you?
     Caller:  How do I get on the Internet?
     Me:      Do you want to know how to access the online catalog by
              telnet?
     Caller:  I want to go on the Internet and surf the Web.
     Me:      Sir, this is a library.
     Caller:  Just tell me how I can log on and look at the Web.
     Me:      (trying to be helpful) Do you have an Internet service
              provider?
     Caller:  What's that?
     Me:      It's a service, like America Online or Compuserve, that
              provides you with an account for a monthly fee.  Then you
              can send email, browse the World Wide Web, that sort of
              thing.
     Caller:  You mean I have to pay for it?  MIT won't give me one of
              those for free?
     Me:      Are you affiliated with MIT?
     Caller:  I'm an alum.
     (At that time MIT was not providing free email accounts for alums.)
     Me:      You would have to call Information Systems and ask them,
              but I don't think so.
     Caller:  (getting angry) I pay thousands of dollars every year to
              your stupid university!  I should be entitled to a free
              account!
     Me:      Look, this is a library.  You should call Information
              Systems with your concern.
     Caller:  Everywhere I just get this runaround!!  All I want to do
              is get on the Internet, OK?!

At this point I gave him a phone number to call that, with any luck, would have enough voice menus to go through that he'd have plenty of time to cool down. At least I hope he has a computer. No, wait, I take that back.

...and I suppose that's for your research?

Another fun thing about working at the library was seeing what sorts of things people were reading or doing research on. One person might be checking out a stack of books on bootstrapping techniques. Another might have some works of Nietzsche. Sometimes someone would check out a book by some interesting author and recommend works to me. Sometimes I recommended works to them. I started reading a lot of things I might otherwise not have bothered with.

Of course, it also happened that some patrons were interested in works pertaining to human sexuality, and the Humanities Library had a fair collection of these. Normally this is no big deal and I paid very little attention, unless someone REALLY seemed to be camping out in the HQ section. After all, what people wanted to read was really none of my business; my business was to help patrons find what they wanted and make sure everyone had access to the materials.

I admit, however, that it did raise an eyebrow a bit when one of my TA's strolled into the library with a book to return. As he pulled the book from his backpack, he suddenly noticed me sitting there. Turning a bright shade of crimson, he stammered a greeting, deposited the book, and departed as quickly as possible. The book? The old favorite Kama Sutra. I felt for the poor guy, even as I realized that, if he hadn't reacted as he had to my presence, I probably wouldn't even have noticed the title.

Gee, you're even smellier in person!

At MIT, the stress level is very high, and sleep deprivation is extremely common. In fact, many a student rarely bothers to go home from the computer lab, much less, oh, shave or bathe.

One day a particularly, um, aromatic individual came up to the circulation desk with a number of books he wanted to renew. OK, there were thirty books he wanted to renew, and the guy had such powerful body odor that he left a TRAIL behind him as he walked. I mean, this guy was so funky, he could have wilted garlic at 100 yards. I scanned and stamped all the books, trying furiously not to breathe. Finally, I said to him, "You know, you can renew books by phone..."

"As many as you can carry..."

One common question from patrons is, "Is there a limit on the number of books I can check out?" The answer, at least while I was working there, was, "No." This question was usually asked by people with maybe 20-30 items. I am certain if they could have known how many items some other people were checking out, that their perspective would be drastically different. One man used to come into the library every so often to renew all of his 102 books. This was generally once every three months, since that was the longest an item could be renewed over the phone before the library insisted on seeing the actual book. This did not, however, mean that the book could not be renewed further; so every three months in he'd come with a dolly and several boxes of books. He was very responsible and kept up with his due dates, recalls, and fines. He even helped me stamp them.

Even this number was not the most books a patron has had out of the library at one time. In the spring of 1997, I noticed one young man who had around 250 books checked out. Naturally, they were all on term loan (it would be the only way he could ever keep track of them all), and he was checking out some more. He didn't ask whether there was a limit; I assumed he probably knew there wasn't or would keep going until someone asked him to stop. Probably he was working on a big thesis or something; it wasn't my business, so I didn't ask.

Maybe the next week, he came in to check out some more books. At this point his record reflected that he had around 300 books out, and he showed no signs of slowing down. I wondered how he could possibly read all these books, but I said nothing. I did try to go through and see if any of the books were recalled, though.

Eventually, as he checked out more and more books, he inevitably came to the notice of the librarians. A couple asked him if he would please stop checking out more books and start returning some, as he was completely depleting some research areas of resources. We began to wonder if he would show up on the due date with a truck full of books, or if (horrors!) he might wait until the grace period began, in which case the computer would note that the books were overdue and do you want to renew them? FOR EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Some of us theorized that he was not reading them at all, but rather renting them out to friends or starting a library of his own. Maybe he was using them for an art exhibit or to build book furniture with. I began to hear rumors that a limit on circulating items might be imposed. In a way I disagreed with that necessity, because, after all, we had always told everyone there was no limit. On the other hand, it is the library's prerogative to limit the circulation of its collection.

As of the time I quit working at the library at the end of May 1997, the student had not yet returned very many of the over 560 books that he had checked out.

Last modified: 10/20/97

Jeri A. Champion (jachamp@mit.edu)