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I don't know how the library is run now, but in the 1960s when I was at State, a "closed stack" system was in use. When most undergrads wanted to check out a book, they had to search the card catalog for the desired book(s) and then place an order with the front desk, after which they waited for a library employee to retrieve the sought after item(s), if they were available. I, like most undergraduate students, found this slow and cumbersome process to discourage library use unless I absolutely had to find a reference for some class.
A new world was opened to me when I was invited to join the Engineering Honors Program in my Junior year. One of the real perks of that program was a stack pass that allowed Honors students the same access to the library stacks as graduate students. This meant that we could finally do serious research or just serious browsing through that treasure trove of books and periodicals anytime we wished, and I thoroughly enjoyed this privilege.
The beauty of browsing through the stacks is the ability to cast a wide net in searching for material on a given topic. Today's computer search engines are great for quickly locating a book or periodical in a library, provided that you already know the title or author or the right key words; however, they are very narrowly focused. You will quickly find what you want, but will find little else. Search results were somewhat better with the old card catalog systems if one was searching by subject, because you were forced to at least glance at the information on numerous cards in the process of narrowing the search. But nothing was more productive than going to the stacks after looking up a single reference on the subject of interest and then scouring the rows of books around it for related material. By actually browsing in the stacks, your search for material related to your interests had no constraints, and you often found wonderful and valuable books or periodicals that would never have popped up in a computer search.
Access to the stacks gave me entry into a storehouse of treasures that could both assist me in my studies and indulge my interests in fields outside my aerospace engineering major. I fondly recall that one of my stack discoveries was a complete collection of Life magazines from their first issue in the 1930s on. It had nothing at all to do with my honors program or later graduate program research projects, but I spent hour after hour thoroughly enjoy going through every page of every issue of Life in the collection. I remember not only learning much about the beginnings of World War II in Europe and Asia through the photo dominated stories in Life, but also being fascinated by advertising for everything from old cars to toothpaste and articles detailing the popular culture of the times, chronicling life in the United States as it went from Depression into World War and Korean War and into the new prosperity and Cold War of the 1950s.
Even after 40+ years, I remember finding an advertisement in the first issue of Life proclaiming that "Your Car is Not a Nudist" and noting its need for Simoniz wax, showing a drawing of a nude young woman standing partially behind a strategically placed shrub next to the car; and then finding that the same ad in the next issue of the magazine with a vine drawn over the woman's previously bare breasts. So much for Life attempting to be the Playboy of its era! I also recall an article from the very early 1940s that proclaimed Glenn Miller as the nation's top band leader in both the "hot" and "sweet" music categories. Such revelations were assuredly not the intent of providing an engineering honors student with a stack pass, but these accidental discoveries among the thousands of treasures in the stacks became a valuable and memorable part of my education at State.
I only wish today's students could discover the wonders of a great college library the way I did; but the delightful mysteries of the stacks have been replaced by the vast wonders or wasteland (take your choice) of the Internet. In libraries from the tiniest of villages to the world's greatest universities all those glorious books and old magazines are being shipped off to remote, catacomb-like storage facilities to make room for row upon row of keyboards and LCD screens with their giga-bites of ones and zeros. Books have been replaced by blogs, catalogs by websites, and periodicals by instant updates on this-or-that-dot-com.
I remember being in the D. H. Hill stacks once when there was a power failure. It was no big problem because I could still sit by the window and read amidst that huge storehouse of print. Today when the lights go out knowledge dies with it!
-- Dr. James F. Marchman III, NC State Class of 1964; Ph.D 1969
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