Monday, December 8, 2008

Norlin Library

[Norlin Library]


In honor of the ever-dreaded finals week, I decided to scout out Norlin Library and see exactly how packed the place was getting with finals rushing towards the entire school while we finish up our last week of classes. I discovered several things, well known to most CU students:
1. Anywhere in the library where you have a chance of talking/being loud and studying at the same time is totally full. All the time.
2. If you don't want to talk, there's around a zillion nooks all over the place that you can use to study, in every library and most buildings on campus.
3. Construction is never-ending on campus, and although useful, is rather irritating when half of the library's usual study space is taken up.
What I discovered, instead of the lack of space I previously found when wandering through the main parts of the library, was the most extensive collection of books I'd ever seen and tons of room to spread out and work in a quiet place. That's so handy after attempting to do anything resembling studying in the highly distracting dorm environments!

For those of you who haven't been in Norlin, imagine this (and yes, that black dot is a person!):Now multiply that by 3 levels and 3 or 4 shelves wide. THAT IS SO MANY BOOKS! I'm a total bookworm, so I find this to be a really impressive feature of CU. I couldn't even find exactly how many books there are in the Norlin collection on their website, but it's not of any great importance- with an extremely adept inter library loan system, CU-Boulder can put just about any book in the world in your hands.
The Library's typical Boulder view [Norlin Library]

So if you're scrambling to prepare for finals or just want to find some more info for a research paper, I would definitely recommend hitting up Norlin- once you enter the "Norlin Stacks", which are the huge collections I mentioned above- there's some great desks and tables where you can get your work done. But simply wandering around until I found a new room seemed to unearth plenty of empty seats for me as well. :-)

1 comment:

Heidi Obermeyer said...

Norlin is also hosting an event to test out their new website before winter break. It takes about an hour, you get free pizza, and you get to make sure the new website is useful to you!
More information can be found at this website: http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/news/
Or contact Stephanie Alexander at Stephanie.Alexander@Colorado.EDU to sign up/for more info!

This event runs December 9, 10 and 11 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM each day.