Blame, Rant for the Day

While it may be true that Yale has "11 million volumes" in its library, it's a frustrating fact of student life that most of these volumes are not very accessible.  It's hard to browse.  You can't really rely on browsing the SML stacks to stumble upon interesting titles, because all of the high-use books are in the undergraduate library, and a significant and surprising number of important books turn out to be in the long-term storage facility.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how books get assigned to long-term storage: major works like Beowulf and the Appositive Style and  Style in Old English: the Test of the Auxiliary are in storage, and yet "Die Neubildung von Substantiven in den Uebersetzungen Koenig Alfreds mit einem Ausblick auf Chaucer" (Muenster diss., 1936) is snugly occupying space on that shelf (not to say it's not riveting).  I'm SURE the Robinson book and Donoghue book have been checked out numerous times in the past 10 years, while I doubt that ol' Erich Schlepper has gotten checked out even once.  Someone should apply the high-use criteria for the inclusion of books in Bass to the SML stacks as well.  

Books are also flung among the various professional libraries somewhat randomly-- nothing like finding that influential studies of medieval religion are up at the Div School, and that studies of Shakespeare, because they happen to touch on theatrical history, are in the Art and Architecture building.  Entries in the catalogue often mistakenly duplicate the number of copies in the stacks, because of the divide between the old Yale call-number system and the Library of Congress system.  Books are also just sometimes bafflingly not there.  And the library closes at 5 on Fridays and Saturdays, and opens at 12 on Sundays!  For comparison, Penn closes at 9 on Fridays and Saturdays and opens at 9 on Sundays; Princeton is open from 8-11:45 every day.  The Sunday-at-12 thing must be a holdover from when everyone was expected to be in church on Sunday mornings.  11 million volumes?  I'd take a well-organized collection of 3 million volumes, stored in a single building, over a scattershot group of 11 million, creatively deposited across 8, any day.