Let the chaos begin!
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Monday, September 13, 2010

Courtney Brown

Fundamentals of Journalism

Dr. Ross Fuglsang

Description

When a student walks in or out of the Learning Center, the first and last thing they smell is coffee. The first thing they hear is a grinding blender dishing out a smoothie, and a sweet blonde lady looks up and smiles. “Hello, Hello how are you today? Need to warm up?”  The lady is Nancy Boyle, manager of “The Spoon holder Café”, and her job is to keep us awake, long enough to do our homework here in the Learning Center.

The warm, home-like scent pervades the air, and helps create an intellectual ambience for the library. It is the mecca of the students, and if you listen closely, you can tell who stopped and had a visit with Nancy – and who didn’t. Those who didn’t make a pit stop can be found curled up and sleeping sweetly on the third floor, on the many chairs and bean bags – and those who did can be heard furiously clicking away at their laptops. The uses and resources at the Learning Center are endless, and it is the mecca of the students, however, the library isn’t all we once knew it to be. It has a rich and diverse history, starting way back in 1904.

Hickman-Johnson Furrow Learning Center was built in 1904. A little known fact about the Library is that it was originally the gymnasium, and the second floor was a basketball court, the third floor a suspended track. It wasn’t until the 50’s that the gymnasium was reinvented into a library, and it was the mid to late eighties before the second half was added. The Spoon Holder Cafe wasn’t actually added until the summer of 2005 – even though today we can’t imagine a single day without Nancy and her crew. The Spoon holder however is not the only addition to the library within the last twenty years. Other additions to the library include the Mass Communication department, as well as the Rhetoric department, the Student success program, as well as the tutoring staff. There is also a plethora of nonhuman resources here, ranging from books and online databases. Anything we could need, or imagine, is right here for us, with concerned staff to help us get there before Doc Heistad decides to not accept your paper because it’s past the due date.

Whether we need to wake up, or we want a quick nap without walking back to our dorm, the Learning Center is there for us. A center for both social and academic interaction, it is among one of the single most important buildings on campus. It is hard not to love the library especially if you spend four years here, falling asleep to the soft clicks, giggles, and blending sounds that come together, and somehow create a lullaby that can’t be sung or heard anywhere else in the U.S.

September 13th, 2010 at 4:25 pm


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