[81alum]

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.)

[81alum]

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.)