The above quote is from Eric Muller (Class of 1984). Read the full memory below:

I spent more time at the Rock between 1980 and 1984 than I care to admit. I’ll share three specific memories.

(1) I spent almost all of my time in a carrel on A Level, on the Prospect Street side, into the wooden desk of which some unnamed earlier student had carved the slogan “Save Soviet Jews! Win Valuable Prizes!”

(2) My favorite time-killer was to go to the very large stack area where decades worth of old bound issues of the New York Times were stored. In today’s digital days, the pleasure of actually turning the pages of those fascinating old newspapers has been lost.

(3) Before graduating, several friends and I marked our respective heights underneath the staircase on A Level. They were still there at our fifth reunion in ’89, but a paint job (I guess) had done them in by the tenth in ’94.

The above quote is from David Muller (Class of 1981). Read the full memory below:

I ended a short relationship early in my senior year while eating chocolate chip cookies in the third floor snack lounge. That was in September 1980. Diana Marcus (’82) Muller and I have now been married for 21 years. The break-up didn’t end our friendship, nor did it sour my taste for chocolate-chip cookies!

The above quote is from Anne Lutz Fernandez-Carol (Class of 1984). Read the full memory below:

Down to the hue of the lights over the card catalog, my memories of the Rock are remarkably vivid thirty years later. I most remember the feeling of marching up the steps energized to spend an evening at work researching and writing—and the feeling of waking up a few hours later with a pad of yellow lined paper cushioning my face atop a carousel desktop. I remember pulling criticism off the stacks to learn more about the contemporary authors that were rocking me on my young heels—Jose Donoso and Robert Coover among them. I remember exactly the relief-filled moment I began to understand the academese in the Poli Sci journal articles I had been assigned. But it wasn’t all high-minded activity in the Rock. I remember getting kicked out of the quiet room for getting the church giggles, and there was a boy I was crushing on badly Junior year who usually studied on B-level. I relocated there from my usual spot on the second floor for several months to facilitate accidental run-ins. There were a few.

The above quote is from Caroline Mailloux (Class of 2007). Read the full memory below:

I spent more time in The Rock than I ought admit. But always on the 4th floor, cityside, overlooking the city of Providence. When my thesis felt all-consuming, I would gaze out the window to behold the beautiful city views and remember that there was life on the outside. When life on the outside felt all-consuming, I could retreat to my Rock world and feel comforted by the endless rows of books, community of other thesis writers, and decades of students who sat at carrell 77 before me on the quest for truth, knowledge, and humanity.

Few places on campus do I associate with Brown more than The Rock.

The above quote is from Pam Boone Canu (Class of 1982). Read the full memory below:

The best place to study especially as a West Quad frosh was the Rock. I fondly remember searching for 2 carrels together, one for me and one for my boyfriend, and slowly falling asleep on those long study dates. I can still remember clearly how upon awakening after a carrel catnap, I would get right back to studying with renewed vigor, but there was nothing worse than waking up after snoozing bent over a carrell…lots of burping of stale air going on then…I LOVED to study at the Rock so much that I took a campus job there working with the Dewey system under Miss Audrey.

The above quote is from Helen Norris Baker (Class of 1976). Read the full memory below:

What a revelation it was to learn what it was to study! And to head to the a Rock every night after dinner, returning back to the dorm around midnight. Of course, a subsequent discovery (that the reading room offered far too many social distractions) led to many solitary evenings at a carrel in the stacks–but that did not detract from the sense that it was my “home away from home” on campus.

The above quote is from Adam Wilson (Class of 2005). Read the full memory below:

I didn’t go to the Rock to study. I preferred cafes. But I did occasionally visit the Rock on treasure hunts. As a lifelong lover of libraries, I was amazed by the sheer volume of books available to us undergrads at Brown. I would go down to the darkest part of a random floor and look for books that called to me.

On one such treasure-hunting expedition I pulled a book with a particularly worn cover. I did so giddily, half expecting a secret chamber to appear, Scooby Doo-style. Sadly, no trap doors opened, but I did get sucked into the story itself. It was a tale from a different time, something that wouldn’t get written today. Something about a fairy prince, I think. Partway through the book I came upon a short poem. I jotted down the lines into a notebook. I’m not sure why, but something about them resonated with me. Here they are:

“Come, my Rose, my Rosa Munda, my flower of the whole earth! come to bloom forever in my garden; to be cherished forever in my heart!”

That poem is still the only poem I know by heart. I came to know those lines not by trying to memorize them, but by repeatedly writing it on bits of paper that I left for my girlfriend in her Keeney Quad dorm room. Under pillows, in coffee mugs, inside her pre-med books, I would slip in this poem for her, loving the idea that at some point she would find it and smile.

The trick must have worked. Thirteen years later, that freshman year girlfriend and I are married. We’ve just had our first baby (Admissions Office: if you’re reading this, make sure to reserve him a space in the class of 2036). I still occasionally scribble down the poem on the random post-it or napkin. I just might put one in the baby’s diaper bag.

While I can’t give the Rock all the credit for the love in my life, there’s no denying that the magic of that concrete box full of books is powerful stuff. That poem found me. And I found expression in that poem. I still love the image of love blooming forever in our hearts, as if love exists in a perpetual state of becoming, of bursting silently like a crocus bulb. So thanks, Rock. And happy 50th!

The above quote is from Neeru Mohan Biswas. Read the full memory below:

Tridib and I spent special moments listening to classical music in the music listening rooms at the Rock.

Tridib had a carrell at the Rock. It was easiest to find him there.

The above quote is from Jonathan Migliori (Class of 2011). Read the full memory below:

Though I got plenty of work done in the Rock, the times where I accomplished nothing were much more memorable. A friend and I would often go for late night study sessions in the sub-basement, Level B, and use one of the classrooms there. One of these classrooms has a locked door in a side wall, so we renamed it “The Chamber of Secrets,” naturally. Every night would start with professions of “I really need to work this time” and “This is due tomorrow.”

Once those formalities were out of the way and our books were symbolically opened, a number of activities could follow. The festivities were always commenced with the repeat playing of our anthem, Youtube’s worst version of “Go Down Moses.” The room’s blackboard would inevitably pull us away from our books as well: we’d collaborate on surreal, nightmarish drawings, practice our cursive, and sometimes just write “Chamber of Secrets” over and over again. At some point towards the end of the night we’d turn the lights off and make scary voices (hers was a guttural, demonic growl, and mine a very camp, shrieky, witch). We would immediately regret this when it came time for a bathroom break and we were too freaked out to walk through the empty basement or be left in the Chamber alone.

The above quote is from Christopher Kox (Class of 1981). Read the full memory below:

Allow me to ramble—these are memories, after all. I first set foot in the Rock in late August, or early September, 1979. I had just arrived, a transfer in from Rhode Island College, where I’d worked as a student assistant for two years. I went directly to the Circulation department, then headed by Ron Fark (who retired as Head of Public Services two years ago), and supervised by Val Urbanek and Elias Schwartz, both of whom held graduate degrees from Brown in Slavic Studies.

Although the Rock was only 15 years old at that time it did not feel new, as its wood and brass trim aged well. Students were still permitted to smoke in the Level A lounge, so the Rock had even more warmth than was typical of mid century architecture. The stack tables and study carrels were already polished by the reading of many books, writing of many papers, and other student pleasures not mentioned here. One of the more frequent visitors to the circulation counter was Professor William Jordy—whom I can still recall conversing excitedly about architecture with Charlie Flynn.

1979-80 was just about the year when the McBee keysort circulation system was being replaced by an “automated” system (CLSI). Thus, circulation workers needed to enter short author and title records as they bar-coded items for check-out. The desk was littered with thick coding pads, one half-page for each item. The same bar codes no doubt remain on much of the collection today, but the data collected was never suited for transition to Josiah, the online catalog. Brown later partnered with Columbia to build an online catalog, and their CLIO may still bear some legacy code from this venture. The beginnings of the “information” revolution were in the air. Our Asian Studies Librarians were instrumental in developing CJK cataloging, and a prototype, touch-screen expert system appeared briefly outside the entrance to the circulation department—developed by Peter Lipman if memory serves—to answer inquiries on collections and services. Brown too was an early adopter of end-user friendly databases we all take for granted today – picking up an InfoTrac as early as 1987 or 88.

In the summer of 1980 I worked on an inventory project with Mary Renda, ’81, now Historian at Mount Holyoke, and we spent as much time talking about gender-politics as we did work, surely to my benefit if not hers. I also graduated in ’81 and went directly to work as a technical assistant in the Library Catalog Department. My supervisor, Audrey Perry, had very high standards and as a result, had also a very high staff turnover.

In the summer of 1983 the catalog department was swamped by two major activities: the revision of catalog entries to conform with the new AACR2 standards, and the entry of new and retrospective catalog records into the Research Library Group’s shared catalog database: RLIN. The implications for file maintenance were great: hundreds of thousands of catalog cards needed manual revision; and an equal number of new cards needed filing. This kept an army of catalogers, and their assistants, busy for months—just in time to go online and say good-by to cards forever. Do read Nicholson Baker’s mid-1990s New Yorker articles on the card catalog so to appreciate some of the wonders found in it then—not least slips indicating cataloging records deferred from cataloging for one-hundred-years, with books still held under lock and key in the vault. Howard Stone was one of the catalog librarians who prepared lists of AACR2 changes, and Dominique Coulombe was in charge of the copy catalogers—both remain at the Rock today. Stone was an avid bicyclist who logged hundreds of thousands of miles touring the country on two wheels and wrote a series of tour guides under the general title Best Bike Trips. The “army” of catalogers included many spouses and partners of Brown faculty, extremely literate and well educated all.

Over the summer twelve student assistants worked for Audrey Perry, and I had the pleasure of supervising them while she was away on medical leave. Two became friends—Fredericka Soloman ’84 and Andreas Saldana ‘84. Soloman was instrumental introducing outcomes assessment into the Massachusetts public schools state-wide curriculum revisions of the 90s. Saldana went on to a career in law and finance. Although Michael Clark ’82 worked in acquisitions, he too was part of our summer clique before heading to graduate school in Ancient History at Oxford.

Curtis Kendrick ’80, currently Dean of the CUNY Libraries, was then attending Simmons Library School and serving as a contract negotiator for the SEIU support staff bargaining unit at Brown. His wife, Mary Beth Souza, was in my class at Columbia Library School, ’87, where I soon found that its Dean, Robert Wedgeworth, had become a close personal friend to Audrey Perry in the years before at Brown.

Ed Hayslip, of the Periodicals Department, was and continues to be a great friend and creative inspiration. Although recently retired, I understand he still does a little gig discussing early jazz recordings at Orweg Library. Ed’s drawings of model T and A Fords grace my apartment in San Francisco. Ed told me the story of a fellow staff member, cataloger David X, who on looking down into the recently remodeled Airport Lounge, questioned if the encircled staircase housed Plymouth Rock. I also became a lifelong correspondent with Ron Fark and his spouse John, and an occasional correspondent on NCAA college hockey news with the late Frank [Michigan Blues] Kellerman—Science librarian. As for the Rock, and the system: there were so many persons in my “family” there, but who could forget Andy Pereira, Andy Moul, Pat Dodd, Linda DePalma, Shelly Lonergan, Peg Mutter, Elli Mylonas, Debbie Small, the late Beth Coogan and so many others.

Finally, I should give a very special thanks to Steve E. Thompson, who refused to allow me another leave-of-absence, in 1986, and thus forced me to face library school and a career in libraries, serving now as Interim Dean at the City College of San Francisco. Many of the tales I repeated while teaching classes for library support staff still held some of the Rock, thirty years later.