The west end of Olin Library’s 5th floor houses a key-coded reading suite for graduate students and faculty. Graduate students in any discipline may use the reading rooms there (the Ancient History & Classics department has its own separate reading rooms on the 6th floor).
The 5th floor reading suite includes:
- Two large reading rooms with reading tables, chairs and soft seating
- A smaller room with a whiteboard and moveable furniture that can be used by groups of up to 10 people
- Two smaller reading areas with soft seating
- Two break-out rooms, where 2-3 people can discuss individual projects without interfering with the work of those in the larger reading rooms.
- Four computers
- A printing/copying/scanning room
- Day lockers, keys to which can be checked out at the Olin Circulation Desk
The suite also houses collections heavily used in graduate student instruction in the social sciences and humanities, arranged in call number order. A non-circulating journal collection is kept just outside the reading room in the fifth floor stacks. All materials on reserve for graduate courses are now housed at and circulated from the Olin Circulation Desk.
Use of the room is restricted to current graduate student and faculty only, and access is controlled through a keypad. The code will change periodically to help prevent unauthorized use. We leave it to the discretion of faculty teaching courses that might need to use the collections housed in the rooms to responsibly distribute the code to undergraduate students who are taking these courses. Graduate students may request access from Olin circulation staff.
Please let us know what you think of the Olin Graduate & Faculty Reading Suite!