This is absurd. Yale should have a 24 hour library, especially during finals.

recent alumni,
Whats wrong with a course called
“Sex, Evolution and Human Nature?”
Sounds fine to me!

This is sad. I owe all that I understand of Godel to a Bass finals period 24hr extravaganza.

well, #4 is certainly right, but the residential libraries are crowded beyond belief come finals. last time i checked, both widener at hahvahd & butler at columbia offer 24-hour services. push comes to shove, i’d trade hot breakfast for a full time 24-hour library.

Perhaps this is a way of the library getting attention and putting pressure for more funding? Much more obvious than other cut backs.

For serious research there are several options:

1. Check the books out
2. Search for a digital copy (Google Books and Google Scholar plus Yale’s and various other databases will make most of what you want available.)
3. Use the stuff you can’t get either of those ways while the library is open, or ask a librarian to make photocopies. Plan ahead so you can work on it a little each day instead of pulling an all-nighter at the last minute.

Seriously, if that’s your complaint, why not complain that the Beinecke doesn’t let you look at rare books at 4am?

Some people aren’t guaranteed privacy and quiet in their own rooms, so they go to other places where they can work without being interrupted.

Maybe a solution is to close the libraries and open study halls so there isn’t the need to pay for for all that book and staffing infrastructure that no one is using.

As a visiting professor I do use libraries up until they close, and on weekends, owing to being busy with teaching and meetings during the day. I find that Yale’s closing hours are unusually early for a place that’s said to be a research institution. Bass is open longer hours but it’s not much use for research. Options like checking all of the books out are not feasible when you go through fifty to a hundred books per day mostly in the evenings. You may learn this if you go to graduate school though probably not if you go to graduate school at Yale. Undergraduate research for short papers of no more than thirty pages is no comparison.

But this article is not really about libraries or research. As earlier commenters observed, it is about not having enough study halls.