Last Monday night, as students gathered in the library to cram for various exams, run through their MB 107 presentations, and prepare for the following night’s orchestra performance, Anna Moore, the late-night librarian, had run out of Buzzfeed quizzes, research questions and other boring librarian things to do. With nothing else to occupy her, she accidentally closed her eyes for a few seconds. Those seconds turned into minutes, which then turned into hours. The next thing Anna knew, it was 8am. Pat Carl, the research librarian knocked on her door and said, “Anna, wake up, the library is a mess! What happened?”
Anna’s exhaustion caused Facilities to hold off on cleaning the library, since they assumed the library had been kept open intentionally. Students were seen sleeping in the red leather chairs on the second floor and in the study rooms. One student even used the extended hours to watch videos from Brazzers in the media viewing room. Pat advised Anna to go home and sleep next time she felt tired to prevent such liberties from being taken.
Stories of people’s late night in the lib began to emerge. Students did their best Walking Dead impersonations as they stumbled back to their dorms—sleep deprived and still complaining about all of the work they had left to do. Surely, their well-rested counterparts thought, these students could not have sat in Case all night, and the library closes at 2am. But they were wrong. Library staff were equally stunned to hear that the building had stayed open for 24 hours. This was a feat that nobody had ever thought possible, especially after years of faculty telling students that they could not get a librarian to work a shift from 2am-8am. But after 51 years, the Lucy Scribner Library pulled its first all-nighter.
Because of this all-nighter, the library will be closed for the rest of the week as it hopes to recover from the immense lack of sleep.
Photo by Rebecca Fawcett '18