Going to the library is a big thing for me. It's a big place. You don't just 'pop in' to the library, it's a day trip in itself! Take supplies - food, water, a sleeping bag if you must. You don't know how long you're going to be in there...
If you're as disorganised as me you'll turn up without a reading list so you will most probably have to start from scratch. Get yourself logged on to an 'express PC' (which automatically logs you out after 20 minutes) and frantically try to get the reading lists up for your course. Once you've got them up, search for the titles in the library catalogue. If you're like me, you may have 4 or 5 books to read for each lecture, with ten lectures in a module, and four modules in the course. You have a lot to find, and understandably, just five minutes of this frantic against-the-clock searching leads to growing frustrations and excessive amounts of sighing and tapping pens violently on the desk. You slam your hand down because in a rush to type quickly you end up incorrectly inputting every single letter; instead of searching for "Water Resources and Development" you appear to be in a quest to find a book consisting of Ancient Gibberish. All of the surrounding students give you that look - you still can't decide if it's a look of pity, or more of a "should I call for a therapist?" glare, but you gradually get more and more frustrated as your results return empty - one copy available in High Demand (one night loan - useless, it takes you that long to get home on the bus), one copy available in Joule library (other side of campus, useless), earliest copy available 7th June 2012 - eh?!
When (or more often, if) you manage to find at least a couple of the books you want, you face the dilemma as a geography student of your books being dispersed over four floors. Four floors, you laugh? That's nothing! (Oh believe me it is). The university library is a big place. There's at least two large flights of stairs between each floor, and going from Floor 1 to Floor 4 in the Blue Zone via the stairs is more of an endurance test than anything (you forget that you have to take the stairs all the way back down as well...). You could always take the lift, but once you did so with a Spanish exchange student and you both somehow ended up in the basement of the law section amongst prehistoric-looking texts and vowed to never, ever do so again. You arrive at the correct floor and burst through the doors, where you come to realise that you've entered a silent zone and despite being worn out from all of the stairs you've just climbed or descended - you wouldn't even class yourself as unfit - you can't even catch your breath because so much as a pant is enough to have a librarian shoot lazer beams from her eyes in the direction of the 'SILENT ZONE' sign, reminding you that it's okay to be completely starved of oxygen so long as you collapse quietly and don't disturb other inhabitants of the library from their work.
You scurry from shelf to shelf looking for shelf 911.7 but you can only find shelves 400-600 and you wonder where you've gone wrong? Have you missed a secret passageway? Are you not studious enough for them to allow you to find the books that, let's face it, you probably won't even read? You end up doing three laps of the same bookcases, forgetting where you've looked because everywhere looks the same. Your bag jingles and the half empty bottle of water in your bag slushes with every step you take, drawing unnecessarily attention to your hopelessly lost self. She must be a first year, they think to themselves, as you scuttle past row after row of desks, clutching your scrap piece of paper covered in chaotic scrawl - you can't even tell where you are supposed to be looking anymore. You forgot to write the names of the author or book clearly so that in the event of being useless at finding books from their shelf reference - which happens to you every single time - you decide to give up altogether and accept defeat. You glumly drag yourself down the mammoth flights of stairs, back into the library foyer slumped and moody because you went to all of that trouble and you didn't even get the book you needed; the one book you convinced yourself you could barely survive without.
But sometimes...sometimes there's those times when you see the book you need. It's not on the shelf but you spot the title of the book accompanied on a library desk by some other poor soul who feels so dependant on that book that they can't function without having it all to themselves, to stop anyone else from experiencing the satisfaction of getting their grubby mitts on the one copy, the only copy in the entire university. It brings back memories of being in the dinner queue at college, when you really wanted a jacket potato but there were 5 people in front of you in the queue - none of the first 4 chose the jacket potato so you thought you were safe but alas, the person in front snatches it up and all you can do is sigh and walk away because there's no other food on offer that you want. Even the dinner lady observes your disappointment and utters "you wanted that love, didn't you?" The feeling is heartbreaking...
...heartbreaking, until you remember that you have visited the library every day that week on a mission to get that book. It's been in the library every time, but not on the shelf. You've gone at 10am to look for it; you've gone at 11pm in the hope that even the geekiest of geeks will have gone home but yet no, it is still nowhere to be seen. You search all of the trolleys for books awaiting to be shelved, you even send your friend to the library to try and find them for you - he fails. You think to yourself that this is all a bit irrational - you could easily just buy the book, and there may even be photocopies of the chapters you need in your subject library, yet you convince yourself that you are after that one book and nothing and no one is going to stop you from getting your hands on it. With all of this in mind, you want to sneak up behind the person holding your book hostage, you want to find the thickest, most ancient encyclopaedia on offer and sneak up behind them and clobber them around the head with it, quickly discard the soiled script and escape with the beloved book by a speedy gallop out of the fire exit before the librarian chases after you and gives you a verbal warning for causing a loud thud in the quiet zone.
But do you really? Although you like a bit of revenge now and again, you do not advocate murder and you accept that you probably should just stop looking for the book because you're never going to get it. You search for the book on Amazon and one used copy comes up for £6. Very cheap, you think, so you buy it. £8-something including postage and packaging. You may not have the satisfaction of finally obtaining the book from the library's shelves, but at least you aren't in prison on account of bludgeoning.
