Penrose Library is a lot bigger than my high school’s library so I was pretty impressed by it. I found a book that was about six inches thick and had 3,000 pages. The downstairs reminded me of the scene from Ghostbusters where a ghost appears on all the books start flying off the shelves. That’s what I got out of my visit.
The lower floor has bound periodicals, government documents, special collections/archives, books Q-Z, juveniles/curriculum materials, and folios. The middle level has new books, browsing books with a three-week loan period, reference books, printer, reference computers, public access catalog on computers, the Virginia Wilcox Herold Reference Area, copiers, Computer Training center, Quick Copy center, Late Night Study Area, Circulation Desk, UTS Computer Lab, Reference Consulting Tables, and a Reserves, Current Periodicals, Microforms, Media Section, which has newspapers, copiers, and microforms. The upper level has books A-P, a media room, and a reading room.
The information seems to be organized into reference books and computers on the middle level, with books A-P on the upper level and books Q-Z on the lower level. The quiet study areas are on the upper and lower levels, and the general study area is on the middle level.
Penrose Library and the Music Branch have 2.8 million volumes of material. There are 1,141,714 books, 5,878 periodical subscriptions, 1,048,483 bound periodicals, 802,656 government documents, 50,167 microfilm titles, and 903,236 microfiche.
Penrose is a research library because you can go there and find practically whatever you need to accumulate knowledge on a certain subject.
Libraries at DU include Penrose Library, the Law Library, the Music Library, and the Taylor Library at the Iliff School of Theology.
Most of Pelikan’s books had call numbers that started with L. That puts them in the Library of Congress’s classification system under Education. I found this out using PEAK on the public access catalog computers and searching for the author of the books on the list.
Modern university libraries are becoming less hardcopy, and more technologically dependent. The use of computers in finding and accessing books provides us with an improved system that is faster and more comprehensive than the card catalogs of yesterday. We can also use them to access the catalogs of libraries worldwide, university and public alike. Scholars can use the Internet to post their articles and achieve greater circulation than if they only printed hardcopies. I think that books will not become obsolete, though, because you’re not always going to be in a place where having a computer is more convenient than having a tangible volume. If you’re in the field doing research or if you’re relaxing, it’s more bothersome to find an internet jack and boot up than to pull out a book and start reading. The other fallibility of the digital system is that hackers can cause a system to crash, making the books and information inaccessible. Worse yet, they could corrupt the original file and change it forever, which is almost as bad as book burning. The good thing about new technology is the widespread connection of libraries and materials that it can achieve, so I think libraries will become more and more digital in the future, but will not make books obsolete.
