A very funny video about Harlan Hatcher Graduate “Labyrinth” at the University of Michigan. At least we don’t have an “East Section of Level 1 A North.”
Written by Phoebe Acheson
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Connect With Us
It’s not that bad, once you get used to it.
-um alum
Only the brightest and most maze-savvy are admitted to Michigan. Really, you have to be a great mind to grasp the vastness and intricacies of Hatcher.
loved the video. i think it adds a mystique to our library. maybe it will bring people in to explore. then again, that would probably stretch our corpse removal fund a little thin…
I went to undergrad at Michigan and I spent many hours in the great reading room there as well as lost in the stacks! Good memories…and I agree with um_alum that once you get used to it, it sort of makes sense.
I would probably enjoy Hatcher library if I was a student there. Lots of opportunity to come across interesting books serendipitously. Unfortunately I have to borrow lots of books there as part of my job for a sort of electronic republishing company in Ann Arbor. We scan periodicals and make them available to customers online (customers including the University of Michigan). Hint – not Google, not J-stor.
Anyhow, every week or two this summer, I get a list of 50,000 pages of old periodicals I need to pick up, about 8 or 9 mail tubs full of books. I need to track them down, load them in boxes, haul them up and down through this maze in several trips on a handtruck, north to the circulation desk where the helpful librarians and student clerks are very restrained in their grumbling as I stack dozens and dozens of books for them to check out. Then I have to haul them all down to the loading dock within a reasonable time so I’m not keeping the truck driver waiting long.
That kind of frustration is what led me to create the video.