Its raining again, time to curl up with a good book

We keep thinking that it is just about spring–and then it rains again. That’s okay, one of the best things you can do in life is find a good book to read in a soft chair while it rains outside. It feels even better if you are reading to avoid studying for finals, but we don’t recommend that. What we do recommend is that you stop by the Sampler Room in the middle of level 3.

The Sampler Room is a special section of the library were we keep books that are fun to read. There are western novels, action novels, adventures, romance, and science fiction books to name a few. And it probably won’t surprise you to learn that this collection is the most highly circulated group of titles in the library. The library has almost 4 million books but the few thousand books in the Sampler Room are checked out around 30,000 times a year.

Of course you don’t have to check the books out. We have lots of comfy chairs in the room and you are welcome to grab a book and plop yourself down for a good long read.

By the way, we’ve had requests to provide a library dog or cat to keep readers company. We like the idea, but we don’t think it will happen anytime soon. The library welcomes service dogs, but we ask that patrons and staff leave their companion animals at home. We have heard rumors of libraries that check out pets, but we have not found any research libraries that provide this service on a regular basis.  In the meantime, we do have books and even journal articles on cats in libraries. For example the Journal of Information Processing and Management, 2009, Vol.52(2), p.106-109 has an article, in Japanese, on the value of library cats.  Learn more by searching for “library cat” in the Scholarsearch box at lib.byu.edu. If you search for “library dog” all you will find is that cats are far more popular than dogs in libraries. For the record our library is neutral in the debate of dogs vs cats.