Students Want Extended Hours for the Tandon Library
The Bern Dibner Library hours aren’t exactly convenient…
The Tandon Undergraduate Student Council has been pushing the library administration for the Bern Dibner Library hours to mirror Bobst’s.
Nothing has been formalized, and the work is just starting, according to Tandon Undergraduate Student Council President Rawan Abbasi, a senior.
“We’ve gotten complaints from graduate students and students who already commute to the Brooklyn campus,” Abbasi said. “No one wants to go to Manhattan late at night to study if they have a library they could use in Brooklyn. So we’re working with the library administration to extend the hours of Dibner. The issue seems to be that there’s not enough staff.”
Currently, Dibner normally closes at midnight, except on Fridays and Saturdays when it closes at 9 p.m. While not all of resources at Bobst are available 24/7, LL1 and LL2 are. Dibner is open 24/7 during finals week.
Dean of the Division of Libraries Carol Mandel said the reason why Dibner does not have the same hours is because of its design.
“Right now, the design of the facilities at Dibner do not enable us to keep the library open when it is not staffed,” Mandel said in an email. “At Bobst, we have guards at the front desk 24x7, so we can allow students to enter even when there are no library staff to check out books or provide other services. And for very late night hours, we are able to restrict access to the two lower levels.”
Mandel said that in order for Dibner to stay open longer, it would need to be redesigned “to create a study section separate from stacks and other areas that require monitoring.”
She added, “We hope that there will be such a re-design in the future, but there are no immediate plans. We do understand that longer hours are desired by students.”
Senior Jonathan Avila, a Computer Science major at Tandon, said Dibner’s hours are usually convenient and that he hasn’t heard any complaints.
“They open at 7 in the morning in the morning and close late enough that I often leave before they close,” Avila said. “I can recall an instance last semester when I stayed over late at night to finish writing an essay and had to travel to Bobst around midnight to finish, but that was a very rare case.”
