Library East or Library West?

The stacks of east

78 said:

Stacks. It's kinda coming back to me. We're those the top floors?

Click to expand...

They were where all the books were stored. There were like 6 or 7 levels. They were behind the main library study part. I accessed just to the right of the checkout desk walking in the front door.

78 said:

That's it. That's what I'm trying to remember. It was like being in a storage unit. Really crammed. You could actually find little metal desks amidst the stacks and get a lot done because it was so quiet.

Click to expand...

Exactly.

78 said:

Thanks, Augusta. No way I would have remembered that on my own. It's an almost sacred memory in a in odd sort of way.

I spent a helluva lot of time in that library alone studying during my first two years. I was back my senior year researching for an editorial writing class. I thought bring there sucked at the time. Here I am 40-plus years later remembering it like it was some kind of special moment in my life. Weird.

Click to expand...

My senior year and grad school year I spent a ton of time there as well, especially grad school. Block out all the distractions.

East, for sure. Definitely bringing back some memories.

Lots of stuff happened in the stacks. Great place for privacy in the 80’s. Must be a complete ghost town now.

I should go back. I worked in the back of library east for 4 yrs of college making student IDs and driving a truck around campus delivering AV equipment each day. Great job. We would load the truck by 730. Head to the Rat for breakfast drving UP on the grass and parking right by the door. Have a nice breakfast with smell of stale beer from the bight before (french toast was my favorite there) then be at the dept offices by 8 when they opened. Our office as the back entrance to Lib east (the east side toward 13th st. I could see Tiger from our drive way. It was called the Office of Instructional Resources. We also ran the projectors on Cartlon Aud. for professors. We finally move to GPA in the middle of campus. I forget the name now. Maybe called Turlington. It was diaganol across st from the Plaza of the Americas.
oh yeah I remember the stacks well. Like caves and tunnels up there.

People used to have sex in the stacks.



Alex.

What are libraries?

The smell was very distinctive in East. I always imagined it hadn’t changed much since the early twenties or thirties. Like a time capsule

Never stepped foot in either. Never had to. Having a graduating class of 7 has its perks when it comes to space. When I enrolled in grad school (graduating class of 3), I was actually given a private office. It was more of a glorified closet, but still.

Library East, the older library, was a general undergraduate library. Library West was billed as a graduate research library but you could use either one whether you were an undergrad or graduate student. When you entered Library East if you hung a right and then back to your left you would enter a long rectangular shaped room that had all of the state's major newspapers attached to wooden poles placed on wooden racks. You could read the sports sections of all the papers from Pensacola to Miami. You could probably find your hometown paper because they also had some of the smaller newspapers.

Heading up to Library East from the south side you would pass the statue of Albert A. Murphree. No man had more influence in higher education in the state of Florida than A.A. Murphree. He was president of Florida State University for Women in Tallahassee (the forerunner of FSU) before coming to Gainesville to lead UF. He had a long tenure at UF so his association is with with UF. When you passed Murphree's statue you could could usually count on him having a can or cup of some drink held in his raised hand place their by some student. Murphree, Spurrier, Wuerffel, and Tebow --- that's UF. Go Gators.

Library East was quirky, Library West was more analytical. If you want to use popular jargon then you would say Library East was right brain and Library West was left brain. There were cubicles on the upper floors in the stacks of Library West that had a metal desk with bookshelves. These cubicles were assigned to graduate students and they would have the books they were using in their research sitting on the bookshelves. If you were studying in a cubicle and the grad student to whom it was assigned showed up then you had to move and let him have his place.

One night I was sitting in a cubicle next to a window that looked out on University Avenue. It was during the height of the protests against the Vietnam War. Their was a group of radical leftist students who were confronting the Gainesville police in the middle of the street. The police set off some tear gas canisters and the students would run and try to regroup. There were a lot of student just milling around, hanging out, just looking for something to do.

I remember both, but if you were a physics major you had your own library much more convenient to your classes.