No, You Can’t

Yes, we know what day it is. And no, you cannot stage lightsaber duels on the concrete beams in the library atrium. We appreciate your enthusiasm and your imagination, but NO. First, there are some pretty clear safety issues with the idea. Second, we do not see any similarities between our atrium and the Mustafar mining station. Third, we are librarians and while, like you, we live in our own little world, we only provide access to information about things. We do not re-enact things and we don’t allow you to re-enact things. If you try, security will arrest you and your droids*.

So, if you want information we can help. If you search for “Star Wars” in our Scholarsearch system you will find that we have 2,266 items. Yes, we know that is not as many items as the guy you know down the street who performs MOSS health checks at a server farm, but it is still a big bunch of stuff. Even better, if you are in your early twenties we have the movie Star Wars available for viewing in the format your generation was meant to view it in. We have it on LaserDisc!

LaserDiscs are like shiny records only they play movies. Oh, that’s right. Records are like large CDs remember those? Or DVDs? Okay, they are like really big Blu-ray disks, but they only play music. Back in the 1980s, when audio records were on the way out and streaming video was not happening because only one guy in Switzerland knew what the Internet was going to be, some people bought videos on big disks. Because BYU has a film program the library did what we like to do. We acquired the technology to support that program. Today we offer Blu-ray disks and we even provide streaming video through our Byugle system. But, we still have some of the old things around in case you are studying the development of media delivery systems. (You could almost say that when it comes to providing information systems, if we don’t have it in our library it doesn’t exist.)

*We WOULD serve their kind here if that would help our patron count. By the way, The Marriott library at the U of U actually uses robots to retrieve some of their materials. Read more here. In our library we use students to retrieve materials. You can read about them here.