WIDENER HOURS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Christmas-time--and once again that seasonal absurdity of curtailed library hours at Widener: 9-5 Tues.-Fri. and closed Sat.-Mon. for 2 1/2 weeks. A total of 32 hours per week out of a possible 168 (19%), all under the fiction that Cambridge is abandoned during the vacation and none of Harvard lives in the area, works on theses, studies for generals, writes papers or reads during this time.

All of this however is merely an extreme instance of the general underuse of library research facilities at Harvard. Here is Widener Liibrary with several million books and periodicals the source of most of the University's scholarly research, and this great resource is available at best only 73 hours a week (43% of the time).

Widener Library should be open 7 a.m.-1 a.m. Monday - Saturday, 9 a.m.-1 a.m. Sunday, all year round. This would make the facility available 74% of the time and practically any time a person would want to use it. The cost this would entail is by no means staggering. Widener (reference/reading room, stacks and circulation) could function adequately with a staff of four during these extra hours: one person at the Mass. Av. entrance (the main entrance would be closed); one at the reference desk; one at the stack entrance, who would also check out books (temporary stack passes would be issued freely during these hours); and a custodian. Using the figure of $4/hr., this amounts to $16/hr. in salaries. Additiional heating costs during the winter would be low, since the library is heated to 60 degrees even when closed, and electricity costs could be kept to a minimum by use of selective lighting. Figuring on total additional costs of $25/hr., these added 51 hours would cost roughly $1300/wk. When one considers that annual expenditures of Widener Library--excluding acquisition and binding costs are almost $1 1/4 million, an added $70,000 is indeed a small sum to enable maximum utilization of one of the University's most valuable assets. Chester W. Hartman.