EVERY year around this time, as warm beautiful days become common outside, many University students are stuck in Alderman Library researching for papers. While being in any library is tragic because it is so nice outside, Alderman is particularly bad, because it needs to be modernized.
The most dreaded part of writing a paper for many students is finding books in the Alderman stacks. This should not be the case. Alderman has a vast collection of books and the staff there generally is quite helpful and knowledgeable. But the library's layout ranks as one of the worst architectural and design flaws at the University.
The library has each floor divided into old stacks and new stacks. This is confusing to students because they must discriminate between the two before they can find what they're looking for. Plus, there is only one way to get from the old to the new stacks, and this causes backtracking and unnecessary walking.
The library also has a very strange floor setup. Besides simple numbers like one to five, in between each floor is an M floor, such as 1M. These floors don't need these distinctions. They simply should be numerical floors, so floor 1M would simply be called floor two and so on. In order to actually get a book, a student must then look at the floor design and determine both what floor the book is on, including these M floors, as well as determining whether the book is in new stacks or old stacks.
Getting to the different library floors is an even bigger problem. The elevators often are in use or simply take a long time. But it is the stairs which are truly an unbelievable experience. They are so narrow that two people cannot fit on them at the same time. Chances are high that more than one person would be using stairs in the main library on Grounds at a school of over 12,00 undergraduates.
As if that is not enough, the stairs in the old section have doors that swing both ways at each landing. The library has posted signs to be careful, since one cannot see around the corner and tell if someone is coming from the opposite way and swinging the door at you. But the staircases are so narrow that it's often hard to tell if someone is coming your way. This is yet another completely useless feature of the library. If there is a fire, the many students attempting to get to the fourth floor, which is the main exit, will have the unnecessary inconvenience of trying to squeeze through the narrow staircase, not to mention these swinging doors to go through.
The actual floors of Alderman are no better. Students almost choke on the dust as they enter them. The floors also are laid out in such a way that students never have any idea where they are. In order to help students find their way, the library has signs posted up everywhere which point to the exit. Yet these signs all will point to the same direction even if they point you into a wall. The intention is that the exit signs point in the general direction of the exit, not to where they actually are.
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Alderman has improved over the years, with additions such as the Alderman Caf
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