As the library enters cyberspace, patrons still arrive to read, write, research—and listen to music

Arthur E. Broadus, M.D., Ph.D., Ensign Professor of Medicine, hesitates to advertise his not-so-private sanctuary: Yale’s Medical Historical Library. He is hoping the crowds won’t catch on.

“I escape over here for about an hour a day when I can, because it’s peaceful and lovely and I can think and read, and sometimes write—and mostly get away from the din,” said Broadus, section chief in endocrinology.

Down the hall and past the rotunda, in the Information Room of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, medical student Tejaswini More is studying from Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease while listening to Haydn through earphones. The library computers have a really good music program, says More, and she gets more done here than in her room.

Just a few years ago, ophthalmology resident Amir Ahmadi, M.D., would have been a more typical library visitor: he has come to look up an article. But now Ahmadi is the exception, because patterns of library use have changed radically. Where annual electronic visits number in the millions, those who walk in the door just top 500,000, a ratio of 18 remote users for every person who walks in. And yet, said Director R. Kenny Marone, M.L.S., “Come in here in the afternoon, and you can’t find a seat.”

Medical students come to use the conference rooms for study groups, to seek guidance from a reference librarian or to borrow a laptop. Residents and students bring their personal digital assistants to a workstation in the Information Room, where they install applications such as InfoPOEMs, eMedicine and Griffith’s 5-Minute Clinical Consult, which provide information about drugs and diagnoses. Students isolate themselves in carrels. Researchers read journals in the sun-drenched Morse Periodical Room. Downstairs, students click away in the Computer Resource Laboratory (CRL), night and day. “We used to have people leave at quarter of twelve, and they were unhappy,” says Marone. “So we decided to make the CRL a 24-hour facility.”

The library is also open to the general public. “They have access: It’s Yale’s way of giving back to the greater New Haven community,” said Marone. Sometimes patients or parents drop in to look up information after a visit to the doctor or hospital.

When library service assistant George Moore began working at the library in 1978, “the furniture was dark, very heavy, very male, and there were heavy drapes on the windows. It was really a very forbidding place. Now we have carpeting, comfortable furniture, plants and better lighting. It’s warm, it’s alive. It’s a very pleasant place to be—a livable space.”