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The lights go out at UGLY - Printable Version

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Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 10:25 AM)garvin link Wrote:Meyer, to you youngsters. It closes for the final time tomorrow at 4 p.m. It wasn't my favorite place on campus by any means -- I almost never went there unless a professor had put reading on reserve there that couldn't be had anywhere else -- but I do have some lovely memories of the Band and Dollies running in during Dead Week to play a number, then disappearing again. And of course it was a good landmark in my first weeks as a freshman, towering above much of the campus as it did. All in all, I'm sorry to see it go. I hope the Band is there to play taps.

Why would they tear it down?  Heck, it was practically new when I arrived!  Oh, yeah :(

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - washingtonismoney - 08-21-2014

What are they replacing it with? Location-wise, it'd make for some nice housing, I suppose. (And...there's still a housing crisis, no?)

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 11:20 AM)garvin link Wrote:The Daily had a story in May that said the University still hasn't decided what to do with the UGLY location once the library was torn down. I haven't seen anything since then.

Whatever it is it would be nice if the architecture tied in better with the original sandstone motif.  IMO.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - rudruff - 08-21-2014

As a former employee of the Stanford libraries, the thought of moving all those books makes me cringe.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 12:57 PM)rudruff link Wrote:As a former employee of the Stanford libraries, the thought of moving all those books makes me cringe.

One day the library will be just rare books and artifacts.  Everything else will downloadable.  Personally I haven't bought an actual book since I got my first Kindle.  Save a tree.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - rudruff - 08-21-2014

And yet libraries are constantly space constrained by all the books they buy. I was involved in high density book storage for the campus. Big off campus climate controlled warehouses that patrons never get inside.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 01:34 PM)rudruff link Wrote:And yet libraries are constantly space constrained by all the books they buy. I was involved in high density book storage for the campus. Big off campus climate controlled warehouses that patrons never get inside.

There is a certain satisfaction in reading from a well made book that isn't available electronically, but the younger generation in grade school now will never know that.  Since they got Kindles/iPads my grandchildren have never owned a "real" book.  All those warehouses need to go.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - rudruff - 08-21-2014

They won't. Google was trying to scan everything for a while, but I don't think they ever got through the legal issues involved in doing that.

For all the claim that everything is going digital, the effort to get all the old stuff back onto the digital format isn't yet worth it to the libraries. Not to mention the big warehouses are a way more efficient way to store books than traditional libraries.

The romance of being able to wander through 6 foot tall stacks of Dewey sorted books as a member of the general public comes with tremendous operational costs.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - stupac2 - 08-21-2014

I think I spent a cumulative total of 30m in Green during my time at Stanford. I only checked out books once Freshman year. There were plenty of humanities classes required for me, but few that required research. I think I wrote something about Roman roads in Britain, I don't even remember any more. And Physics requires very little time in a library, unless you want to study outside of your dorm (and for some reason don't like the physics lounge).

Is that unusual for the crowd here? We do seem to be pretty heavy on fuzzies...

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Robbie - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 03:10 PM)garvin link Wrote:My favorite library back in the day was the Main Library, now known as Green. I'd find the Library of Congress classifications that seemed to touch on whatever subject I was researching, then wander into that portion of the stacks and be lost there for a semi-eternity. Sometimes (in particular, I remember a paper on the New York yellow press and the Spanish-American War) if the topic was obscure enough, I literally didn't see anybody for hours at a time.

My work-study job for almost two years was reshelving books in the government documents library in Green. Mostly that meant finding the right classification point on the shelves and putting the volume back. Occasionally that meant looking at the title ("House Committee on Un-American Activities...") and standing there and reading through it for twenty minutes, and then putting it back on the shelves. It was a quiet place, but full of endless distractions. Much, much better than hashing.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 03:59 PM)Robbie link Wrote:[quote author=garvin link=topic=10404.msg94886#msg94886 date=1408659016]
My favorite library back in the day was the Main Library, now known as Green. I'd find the Library of Congress classifications that seemed to touch on whatever subject I was researching, then wander into that portion of the stacks and be lost there for a semi-eternity. Sometimes (in particular, I remember a paper on the New York yellow press and the Spanish-American War) if the topic was obscure enough, I literally didn't see anybody for hours at a time.

My work-study job for almost two years was reshelving books in the government documents library in Green. Mostly that meant finding the right classification point on the shelves and putting the volume back. Occasionally that meant looking at the title ("House Committee on Un-American Activities...") and standing there and reading through it for twenty minutes, and then putting it back on the shelves. It was a quiet place, but full of endless distractions. Much, much better than hashing.
[/quote]

Just think, today instead of goofing off on the job reading you would be goofing off on the job checking for new posts on Cardboard.  Progress! 

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - washingtonismoney - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 03:29 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:I think I spent a cumulative total of 30m in Green during my time at Stanford. I only checked out books once Freshman year. There were plenty of humanities classes required for me, but few that required research. I think I wrote something about Roman roads in Britain, I don't even remember any more. And Physics requires very little time in a library, unless you want to study outside of your dorm (and for some reason don't like the physics lounge).

Is that unusual for the crowd here? We do seem to be pretty heavy on fuzzies...

I'm as fuzzy as a much-played tennis ball, and I rarely went into Green. (For research purposes...)

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - 81alum - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 03:59 PM)Robbie link Wrote:My work-study job for almost two years was reshelving books in the government documents library in Green. Mostly that meant finding the right classification point on the shelves and putting the volume back. Occasionally that meant looking at the title ("House Committee on Un-American Activities...") and standing there and reading through it for twenty minutes, and then putting it back on the shelves. It was a quiet place, but full of endless distractions. Much, much better than hashing.
Robbie, we probably had the same job.  I worked at Main and also in government documents in the basements below UGLY.  Reshelving was the easy task, though, what I truly hated was shelf reading.  In govdocs there were many publications that had such thin binding that there was not really a spine, and you had to pull the document far enough out to read the call number on its cover.  I could spend hours reading just a few shelves that way.

By the way, there are an increasing number of studies showing that people reading identical texts off of screens compared with a control group reading from a book suffer quite serious comprehension and memory deficits.  We may not have heard the last of paper.  (See Nicholas Carr's The Shallows.)

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 04:43 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:[quote author=stupac2 link=topic=10404.msg94889#msg94889 date=1408660167]
I think I spent a cumulative total of 30m in Green during my time at Stanford. I only checked out books once Freshman year. There were plenty of humanities classes required for me, but few that required research. I think I wrote something about Roman roads in Britain, I don't even remember any more. And Physics requires very little time in a library, unless you want to study outside of your dorm (and for some reason don't like the physics lounge).

Is that unusual for the crowd here? We do seem to be pretty heavy on fuzzies...

I'm as fuzzy as a much-played tennis ball, and I rarely went into Green. (For research purposes...)
[/quote]

Fuzzy???  Fuzzy???  I will have you know I studied in the department of Social Sciences and and proud of my status as a scientist.  As such I remember something about haboobs and how they influenced nomadic life, which is helpful since we are experiencing one right now in Palm Desert, CA.  Not for nothing is our neighboring high school called the Arabs.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - martyup - 08-21-2014

I spent many all-nighters working on Pascal programs at Meyer.  I wonder what ever happened to that DecSystem 20 mainframe?

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Leftcoast - 08-21-2014

Uh .... wasn't the Dec 20 LOTS system located in CERAS for some unknown reason?

I spent many an hour being harried by panicking CS105 and  CS106 students when I worked as a consultant for the LOTS system.  We weren't supposed to help them debug their programs but there was no way you could say no when you got that deer in the headlights look from some poor freshman running out of allocation (time on the computer was strictly rationed.)

I think I ended up writing those darned assignments in 20 different ways by the end of my senior year.



Re: The lights go out at UGLY - 81alum - 08-21-2014

Yes, the Dec system 20 was in CERAS next door to UGLY. 

I represent one of the first known examples of a marriage formed from an online relationship, and it happened at LOTS.  I met my wife when I logged on at LOTS and my FINGER program identified a friend logging on to a terminal across campus at Terman.  I knew my friend was in Kansas, so he could not possibly be the person at the Terman end.  So I sent a nasty message (early text messaging!) to the poacher.  Instead, I learned that this was my friend's ex-girlfriend who had been given permission to use his account that summer.  After chatting via text for weeks, we agreed to meet in person and "one thing led to another", including a thirty three year marriage as of Saturday.

Phil Zimbardo wrote an article about the LOTS culture that was published in Psychology Today, and I was one of the featured "hackers" as we were known.  (This was before "hacking" had come to mean breaking into a computer system.)  Funny thing is that I was not a computer science guy at all, and wound up doing something very fuzzy indeed.

It is remarkable to me to reflect on how PCs, the internet, etc. have so radically changed our world.  We felt we were on the cutting edge as we huddled at LOTS into the wee hours of the morning playing text-based games and writing papers on homemade word-processing programs.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - Rally - 08-21-2014

(08-21-2014, 07:20 PM)81alum link Wrote:Yes, the Dec system 20 was in CERAS next door to UGLY. 

I represent one of the first known examples of a marriage formed from an online relationship, and it happened at LOTS.  I met my wife when I logged on at LOTS and my FINGER program identified a friend logging on to a terminal across campus at Terman.  I knew my friend was in Kansas, so he could not possibly be the person at the Terman end.  So I sent a nasty message (early text messaging!) to the poacher.  Instead, I learned that this was my friend's ex-girlfriend who had been given permission to use his account that summer.  After chatting via text for weeks, we agreed to meet in person and "one thing led to another", including a thirty three year marriage as of Saturday.

Phil Zimbardo wrote an article about the LOTS culture that was published in Psychology Today, and I was one of the featured "hackers" as we were known.  (This was before "hacking" had come to mean breaking into a computer system.)  Funny thing is that I was not a computer science guy at all, and wound up doing something very fuzzy indeed.

It is remarkable to me to reflect on how PCs, the internet, etc. have so radically changed our world.  We felt we were on the cutting edge as we huddled at LOTS into the wee hours of the morning playing text-based games and writing papers on homemade word-processing programs.

Congrats on 33 years!  Here's to the next 33 :)

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - yvonne - 08-21-2014

LOTS was my introduction to Usenet. The rest is history.

Re: The lights go out at UGLY - CowboyIndian - 08-21-2014

Winter quarter 1969. One of my off-campus roommates became the first guy busted for pot on the Stanford campus. He'd brought some up from Mexico under some fruit, which went bad and stunk up the product. He decided to keep it in a carrel at UGLI but the librarians thought someone had left their lunch there to rot and opened up the carrel. Hilarity ensued as we rushed home to vacuum.