Harvard Ends Bag Checks at Lamont Library

You, strutting out of Lamont, with the Gutenberg Bible in your backpack. By Corey M. Rennell

You read that headline right: Lamont is discontinuing bag checks.

For those of you who maybe don’t carry eight to ten books with you at a time, this may not seem like a big deal, but for humanities concentrators, this is arguably the biggest change to rock campus since Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to end Harvard Time.

It’s finally possible to just drop into Lamcaf for a coffee and not have to empty your entire bag, spilling your coffee on the guy behind you in the process.

According to the library, the bag check system was logistically inconvenient, causing a “bottleneck at the guard’s desk.” You can see the full announcement here:

By Lydia L. Cawley

But it makes you wonder: how likely is it that someone would even steal from the library? Especially one that doesn’t even charge late fees. If you were jonesing that hard for the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, fifth edition, it’s so much easier to just CHECK OUT THE BOOK and never return it. Obviously, don’t do that. The last thing we need is more thieves among us.

No longer will we have to schedule a buffer period of 10 minutes on our way out of Lamont in anticipation of a winding line at the bag-check counter. No longer will we dread just popping into the library, because it’ll take longer to dump everything out of our backpack than to just print the readings.

No more bag check? All we have to say is:”it’s about time.”