🚀 go-pugleaf

Julie E Young <jeyoung@mtholyoke.edu> writes:
|   from what i understand , it's true.  the library was constructed on land 
|   which is considered to be clay and when it rains, the clay shifts.  in 
|   order to keep the building more structurally sound, and keep it from 
|   shifting too much between the clay and the weight of the building and 
|   the books, it was necessary to clear some of the floors.
|   i got this info from a Pioneer Valley geology tour that i went on at the 
|   beginning of the year.

"Considered to be clay"?  I was under the impression that geologists
could pretty easily tell if soil was clay or not...

Similar tales are told about many libraries, mostly college/university
libraries, in the US.  When i went to Pitt, for example, it was
"known" all over campus that the reason the open stacks were being
moved to "collapsable" shelving units* on the ground floor level was
that the building hadn't been designed to hold so many books and was
on the brink of collapse.  Moving the books to lower levels would
somehow help.  This was nonsense, of course; the existing shelves were
nearly filled up, and all but the most commonly used research volumes
would eventually be moved to such shelving to make more room for new
acquisitions.

My husband had been told the same story about a university library in
Washington State when he visited friends there.  And many such stories
have come to AFU through the years.

Now, either university libraries are being designed by a consistently
clueless breed of architects, or else most, and quite possibly all, of
these stories are cmapus legends.  I find the second much more
plausible; if the problem were really so widespread, sooner or later
it would become a major topic of discussions at colleges of
architecture, and every architect would have heard of it.  Yet such
stories are told about quite new buildings as well as older ones.

Given that there is good reason to believe that these stories are
largely folklore, we need a bit of proof to consider this one
something different.  So far all we have is evidence that the story is
widely known, which makes it no different than many others which can
be shown to be false (like the Pitt library tale).

- Cindy Kandolf, certified language mechanic, mamma flodnak
 cindy@nvg.unit.no                      Trondheim, Norway
 The flodweb: http://www.nvg.unit.no/~cindy/
 Follow the links to the Bilingual Families Web page!

* When "closed", the shelves were right up against one another; they
were on tracks so that spaces could be opened wherever needed.
Pressure sensors on the floor under the shelves would prevent shelves
from coming together if someone was standing there.