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

Fabulous, large chocolate chip cookies in the lounge—a welcome break from studying!

The above quote is from Michael Sosnowski (Class of 1985). Read the full memory below:

A treasure trove for digital media for all of time…Ahh…the scent of a library in the air…a societal archeologists/anthropologists dream come true…seeing artifacts and drifting off into other worlds visual and the like…Next best to Library of Congress and seeing the Kislak Collection or Thomas Jefferson’s library catagorized into Memory,” “Reason,” and “Imagination”

The above quote is from Quinney Harris (Class of 2006). Read the full memory below:

I basically lived in the private study rooms. Keep rocking on Rockefeller!

The above quote is from Leroy Stoddard (Class of 1967). Read the full memory below:

At the library dedication I was vaguely aware that there were students opposed to what the Rockefellers represented. Was it Nelson or another family member who led the family delegation?

Four years later I had a chance to shake Nelson’s hand at an event in New Haven and refused.

At around the same time as the dedication several Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers grabbed a bearded student, pulled him into some shrubbery, and roughly cut off his beard.

The above quote is from an anonymous memory. Read the full memory below:

One of the stairwells had a ladder that climbed up to a roof access panel which was never locked. When I got bored studying, I would climb up on the roof and look out over downtown Providence.

The above quote is from Svante Fischer (Class of 1994). Read the full memory below:

The Rock was unlike any other library I had been to before coming to Brown. There were open stacks. And there was still a smoking lounge in the basement at that time. I probably spent more time there than in any other building on campus.

The above quote is from Dagmar Schaeffer (Class of 1987 AM). Read the full memory below:

I came to Brown in summer of 1985, after I had graduated in Germany, as a teaching assistent in the German Department and a graduate student in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.
I remember how impressed I was to learn that the “Rock” was open till midnight (or even later, I don’t recall details). This had been unheard of from German universities in those days. So I became a regular visitor at all hours of the day (and the evening!) although I did not like the building very much, but who cared. My most vivid memory is that of endless card files in hundreds of wooden drawers which I searched over and over to find the literature for my papers and my master’s thesis – and I found plenty!

The above quote is from Brian Barbata (Class of 1967). Read the full memory below:

During the first semester of my Freshman year (1963), the Rock was nearing completion. We were hanging out around Jameson House late one night and suddenly there was a loud commotion coming from over on George St. Jameson emptied out to see what was happening….along with seemingly every other dorm and frat house! We joined a growing throng making its way down hill, not knowing anything about what was going on. Eventually we found out: A Brown activist group had organized a march for he odd purpose of burning down the Rock before it was finished! Someone had decided that Mr. Rockefeller (the evil capitalist) was at the core of the dreaded “Military-Industrial Complex”, so his generous donation must have some secret purpose. Mind control, perhaps! In any case, the police took several students away at the Rock, and it was over in a couple of hours. The next day, there was a rumor that a student member of the Black Panther Party (hey, I’m just the messenger), claiming to have been defending himself, broke the neck of a German Shepherd police dog that was keeping the marchers away from the library. It was my first exposure to this kind of activity that would change the country over the next few years. Welcome to The Sixties!

The above quote is from Michael Keenan (Class of 2009). Read the full memory below:

I wrote my first book of poetry, Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery, which will be released by A-Minor Press this May, in the basement of the Rock. I would write and organize what I’d written by the dim white light of the most Eastern cubicle until 3 AM almost every Autumn night. I remember the short but triumphant elevator ride back up to the world after a night of focused and successful work. And I remember the walk in the dark back to my car. And then driving by the Rock as it was shutting down and gazing into its enormous silence and finding a sanctuary, a home.

The above quote is from Robert L. Friend, M.D. (Class of 1968). Read the full memory below:

I started at Brown as a beenied member of the class of 1968 in 1964 and soon made the Rock my home. I remember studying at a carrel in the stacks with a view of the street. I spent more time there my freshman year than anywhere else as I buried myself and my fear in the comfort of books and solitude. I may have seemed like a bold, brash New Yorker to my room-mates at Archibald, but I was terrified inside. I also remember the time I made a discovery that has frequently been relevant to me as I work with teenagers as an adolescent psychiatrist. That discovery had to do with the way in which nearly anything can become fascinating, absorbing, and distracting when there is work and a deadline to be avoided. I was studying for some exam or other and found myself captivated by a book in the stacks near me. I was drawn to it as if it were the secret of life or a guide to sexual satisfaction…It was a book on census data from the early 18th century of the Pennsylvania Dutch counties! I was mesmerized and remember telling myself that this data was “really interesting.” It came to me in a flash that, no, this data was not really interesting but that the interesting thing was how I could possibly think that! A mind defensively seeking an avoiding distraction will stop at nothing, even census data from a long past century. As parents tell me about how they forbid their kids to use video games, phones, ipads etc. when exams loom in order to “protect” them from distraction I think to myself that what they really have to look out for is that fascinating census tract data.