A wave of trauma

is rippling through my Columbia community. The Barnard library is closing for good (it will be reinstituted in a new building), and this means that the Barnard books that we normally are allowed to hold onto for months, indeed years at a time must all be returned to their home! NOooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

(Also, WHERE IS SHKLOVSKY'S THEORY OF PROSE, book #6 on the overdue list?!?)

The more substantive reason that this is a very unfortunate development: Barnard has effectively been the high-quality usable undergraduate collection here. Theoretically Milstein (housed within Butler) should be the undergraduate collection equivalent to the Lamont-Widener or CCL-Sterling situation at Harvard and Yale respectively, but after renovation that collection got dispersed across almost a dozen different reading rooms on different floors, all of them so heavily populated by students as study areas that getting around to get to a specific shelf is a distinctly horrible experience; then, too, the purchasing for Milstein was never sufficient to offer real doubles for essential stuff, and a lot more books only exist in Butler than was my experience at Harvard or Yale. Whereas the Barnard collection has been amazing and also ultra-accessible/user-friendly - alas, no more....