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familiar and congenial space

The New York Times has a story on UT's plans to move all of the books out of the Undergraduate Library and use the remaining space for a big, honkin' computer lab. I've joked before that the UGL has about as many books as my high school library, but the story notes, "experts said it was symbolic for a top educational institution like Texas to empty a library of books." I can't say that I'm sorry to see the UGL collection be dispersed; it's pretty frustrating to go the PCL, and realize that one of the books I want (usually a comic book) is over at the UGL. Hopefully the UGL comics collection will move into PCL, rather than the Fine Arts Library, which an even longer trek from the College of Communications.

On my campus tour in high school, our sorority-girl tour guide, told us, "This is the Undergraduate Library over here. People call it 'the UGLi,' and it is ugly." Now, I completely agree that the UGLi is indeed ugly, but in my three years at UT, I have never heard anyone refer to it as "the UGLi."

Posted by McChris at May 14, 2005 01:39 PM
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Comments

Weird. I went to U of Michigan, where, of course, the undergraduate library is called the Ugli. And man, ours WAS freakin' ugly. They tore the thing down and rebuilt it since then, though, so it's not an eyesore anymore.

Posted by: jr at May 16, 2005 08:58 AM

when i was at purdue, they did this to their UGRL (u-girrrlll, or undergrad library) 3 years ago [http://dlc.purdue.edu] what UT is trying to do now...

mega-large universities are soooo behind the times...

Posted by: dm at May 16, 2005 09:20 AM

IIRC, when I was a student, the 2nd floor of the UGL was on Dewey Decimal and the 3rd on LoC. Or maybe the reverse. What a clusterfuck.

Posted by: Adam Rice at May 16, 2005 04:55 PM

The way it's set up now, the second floor is a huge computer lab and the IT Services offices. The third floor is half-computer lab, and, as the story says, 90,000 books. The first floor has some reference books, popular periodicals, and, yes, a pretty good sized computer lab. The building is already mostly a computer lab; it's like the books are just there for decoration.

Posted by: m4dd4wg at May 16, 2005 06:29 PM

Then you ain't old enough, is all. The UGL was commonly known on campus as "the UGLy" when I was at UT in the late '70s. I still call it that, and it still is, too.

Posted by: Sam at May 18, 2005 09:42 PM

Myself, and all my undergraduate friends refer to it as the UGLy. Also, the PCL is (in my circle at least) known as the PiCkLe.

Hopefully the FAC retains the tables in the lobby, which is where I study on campus.

Posted by: Jonathan Horak at May 20, 2005 02:53 AM