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Good articleWidener Library has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
February 16, 2015Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on June 9, 2014.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the four miles of stacks aisles in Harvard's 3.5-million-volume Widener Library are so labyrinthine that one student felt she ought to carry "a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle" when entering?

Images

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  • http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/deepLinkResults?kw1=Widener%20Library&index1=Place&digital=true&harvard=true The Mother Lode
  • Unused cite (cornerstone laying): "The Harry Elkins Widener Library". Harvard Alumni Bulletin. XV (37). Harvard Bulletin, Incorporated: 604–5. June 18, 1913. Open access icon
  • https://artsandculture.google.com/story/inside-widener-library-harvard-library/JAXR34pRPZGtKw?hl=en

Sources

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Some of these links probably aren't in the right subsections -- sorry -- EEng (talk)

Random

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General

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HEW Collection

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  • Winship, George Parker. "The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library: The Widener Collection of Books." Harvard Alumni Bulletin 17 (16 June 1915), pp. 66-70.
  • [14] Text of the deed of gift -- absolutely fascinating
  • [15] Harry's books
    1. volumes vs #titles vs. other items (2500? 3300?)
  • Official name of the rooms
  • What's in the display cases?
  • "Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Collection" vs. "Harry Elkins Widener Collection" http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/widener/collections/harryelkins.html

Ask a Librarian

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  • [16] See "related questions" for rich sources!

library, HEW, EEW, etc.

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This 'n that

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  • Article gives capacity of 3 million vols -- Snead says 2.2 million at p.153. (a) 3 million may include Pusey; (b) I vaguely recall that some mechanical areas on lower levels were converted to shelving at some point. [26] says 6 million "books".
  • HUL vs. HCL: The article currently muddles the relationship among Widener; the Harvard College Library(ies); and the Harvard University Library. This isn't easy to explain.
  • Architecture:
  • Widener Room
  • WWI artwork (Sargent, apparently [27]) More Sargent [28]
  • Ask-a-Librarian list of sources on murals [29]
  • Old WP article said "Beaux Arts", but A to Z, Shands-Tucci, Bunting all seem to give a variety of styles -- Georgian, Imperial, ...
  • Widener full by 1930s [30]
  • Two tablets inside entrance vestibule
  • [31]
  • Can the photo be used?
  • Says Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," and "The Dunwich Horror." mention Widener

Other stuff:

  • A weird library fisticuffs at [55]
  • [56] NEDL
  • [57] Encyc of Library History re HCL, HUL (excellent)
  • [58] Planning academic and research lib bldgs
  • [59] Eliot worries that donors will be miffed if their buildings are eventually replaced; urges that Gore Hall be preserved somehow

Hist Soc of Penn

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  • [60] Trumbauer papers

Traffic study??

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Catalog changeover

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  • New Yorker article, and Library Bulletin response, cited here [62]

Other notes

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A most unusual collection of facts

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NEDL (needs a separate article)

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Related article idea: HOLLIS

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Tumblr, "Sprinkler Valve Through Door"

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For the record, since a sharp-eyed GA reviewer asked about it, and someone's bound to ask again: While tumblr blogs are not normally considered reliable sources, this one [68] is an official blog of Widener Library, as described at [69] (and note that this last link is to the official hcl.harvard.edu site, hcl being "Harvard College Library"):

[Widener's] librarians started a Tumblr blog, named "Sprinkler Valve Through Door," to act as a window into the collections, spaces and services of Widener. "I'm hoping people familiar with the stacks get the title immediately and laugh," said Manager of Reference and Information Services Reed Lowrie, one of the blog's creators...

So it's an RS, IMHO. Any disagreement on that? EEng (talk) 08:03, 4 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An official blog?! Laughing my socks off. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:02, 13 January 2015 (UTC) [reply]

Infobox image

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1. When I click on the image, why do I go to a different image?
2. Should the image have a caption?
3. Is the image c.1914 or c.1915, or does it not matter? Thanks.

Martinevans123 (talk) 21:52, 7 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(1) It's because I forgot to remove the link= when I switched the image a while back. The link= trick allows the thumb to be a crop, but when the user clicks he gets the complete image, uncropped; but this thumb isn't cropped, so no link= is needed. To see the technique in action where it really does a great job, click the image at Phineas_Gage#Phrenology -- if the thumb weren't cropped, you couldn't read the words at all, so it's cropped. Yet when you click you see the complete "map".
(2) Well, a caption saying Widener Library wouldn't tell the user anything he couldn't figure out for himself, and I don't know what else we could add. I suppose we could say c. 1920 but since it looks exactly the same now as it did 100 years ago I don't know if there's any point to that either. Any suggestions?
(3) I fixed the description page (for the image you used to get when you clicked, before I fixed it -- see (1) above) to conform to the source, which says c. 1914; though it's certainly no earlier than late 1914, given the construction schedule. Notice the horsecart at right.
EEng (talk) 02:39, 8 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Forbes Smiley

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Wasn't Widener Library one of the victims of notorious book thief Forbes Smiley? I think his depredations should be covered in the "Burglary and other incidents" section. Reify-tech (talk) 22:52, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

But his article doesn't even mention it? Martinevans123 (talk) 23:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Harvard was definitely hit hard by Smiley. I don't know whether Widener held collections of specific interest to him or not. Reify-tech (talk) 23:13, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'd expect it to see it, supported with a source, at his own article first. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:16, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know which libraries Smiley stole from at Harvard. A Boston Globe article mentions that he hit Harvard's Houghton Library ([70]). Perhaps this should be added to the article Houghton Library, which makes no mention of him. Also, the following Google Books reference mentions Stephen L. Womack specifically as having mutilated books at Widener ([71]). Reify-tech (talk) 23:32, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
By all means add those to his article, and if there are no objections, perhaps add that second one here? Martinevans123 (talk) 23:39, 26 February 2016 (UTC) p.s. hope you don't me bracketing your urls just to tidy.[reply]
Thanks, I'd forgotten that method of taming unwieldy URLs. Reify-tech (talk) 23:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Houghton was indeed Smiley's target. Widener certainly has plenty of hard-to-replace stuff, but nothing really worth stealing since its "Treasure Room" was transferred to Houghton in the 1940s. The exception is Harry Widener's own collection, which by the original terms of Mrs. Widener's gift cannot be removed from the Memorial Room except for conservation etc.; that was later modified to allow books actually being consulted to be taken to Houghton's reading room.
I've thought about expanding the Houghton article but I can't find a critical mass of material for the kind of fun article I like to write.
Womack was the "Slasher" already mentioned in the article. At first I wrote his name in, but since he's almost certainly still alive and really just a sad (rather than evil) character, I didn't see the point of humiliating him further since including his name doesn't really increase the reader's understanding of what happened. EEng 01:11, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What a very strange rationale. As we all know there are many "sad (rather than evil) characters" about, many of them eagerly editing Wikipedia articles. Have you never heard of WP:NOTCENSORED you unremitting and twisted bibliophile!? [72] Martinevans123 (talk) 10:28, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

X Cage

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Number of volumes of 17 million, NOT 3.5 million

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The Harvard Gazette of May 26, 2016 reported on the speech of Harvard President Drew Faust at the Commencement Ceremony of Harvard University:

"Harvard President Drew Faust also addressed those gathered for the Afternoon Program, officially the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Universities, Faust said, are needed now more than ever, even though the broader society seems increasingly to discount the importance of reason and knowledge.

Faust cited two signature buildings that flank Tercentenary Theatre, Memorial Church and Widener Library, as examples of the important role that Harvard plays and the characteristics and values that it seeks to instill in its students.

Widener Library, the center of a University system with 17 million books sitting on 57 miles of shelving, represents knowledge and truth, a tenet that Faust said is important not just to discover but to test and affirm, so that people can discern when what is presented as true is not."

The number quoted in the article of 3.5 million books must be wrong. My undergraduate school had a library of 2 million volumes, and when I became a graduate student at Harvard, with stack access privileges, I estimated simply by walking through the stacks, that Widener must have been at least 10 times larger. --ROO BOOKAROO (talk) 18:07, 27 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nonetheless the article's right. What Faust actually said [73] (referring to Widener, which she was facing as she spoke) was
We also see a repository of learning, with 57 miles of shelving at the heart of a library system of some 17 million books...
The Gazette article [74] originally paraphrased this inaptly as
Widener Library, the center of a University system with 17 million books sitting on 57 miles of shelving...
-- which misled you. Alerted by your post, I spoke with my Illuminati colleagues, and the Gazette piece has now been corrected to read:
Widener Library, whose 57 miles of shelves are at the center of a University system with 17 million books...
The answer to, "How many books does Widener have?" depends on what you mean. At its opening the stacks capacity was about 2.5 million. After levels C and D were completed, 3 million. Including the Pusey extension you get maybe 3.5 million. And that's not counting the millions of items belonging to Widener but stored offsite at the Harvard Depository in Southborough. The 17/18/19 million numbers (book titles/volumes/items) is all 90 units of the Harvard University Library system, including Depository items. EEng 01:55, 28 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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Revert of angle brackets in comment

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@EEng: Regarding this revert: [75], I didn't understand the part of your edit summary that said "I PGA e". I'm curious why you feel it's necessary to make a leftward-pointing arrow in this comment, when there's nothing to the right that the comment might be confused with? As I mentioned in my edit summary, this causes this comment to show up on a project-wide report as malformed HTML (which is also what it looked like to me when I first saw it). -- Beland (talk) 16:11, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see the next edit summary: 'Prior edit summary should have read: If your report is wrong, fix your report; do not clutter up watchlists in order to ""clean up the reports"'. I considered excluding HTML comments, but that might accidentally hide some cases where some obsolete HTML has ended up in a comment and should still be taken care of. I could possibly make some elaborate code change, but it's far easier to simply remove the characters from this comment if they are unnecessary. -- Beland (talk) 16:14, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A comment is a comment, not code. Someone might even use a comment to exemplify some incorrect code, and you should not correct that. Whatever's in a comment should be left alone. No elaborate code change should be necessary to ignore whatever's in comments. EEng 17:09, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sometimes the contents of comments get reincorporated into live wikitext, so I think it's wise to repair spelling and syntax errors in them. I still don't understand what these two angle brackets are adding to this comment that makes them worth keeping? -- Beland (talk) 17:36, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
They're worth keeping because an editor actually involved in the article (me) wants to emphasize that the comment applies to the thing to the left of the comment. Maybe it's a minor point, but there it is, and it definitely outweighs your desire to keep your report clean. And anyway, your technology should have a way for you to accumulate a "false positives" list so that future runs will ignore things already examined.
Beland, I know you mean well and it's good that you're linting these little errors, but leave comments alone. Period. If someone un-comments something we'll just have to deal with it at that time. Some languages have a facility, distinct from "commenting out", to disable code (e.g. if (true == false) { ..}) and if we had such a facility there'd be no problem with your fixing the code in those braces, but we don't and comments are off limits. EEng 19:27, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I have replaced the << with a ←, which does a better job emphasizing the comment applies to the content on the left, and does not look like a broken HTML tag. -- Beland (talk) 22:41, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That's very kind. But I'm not going to go find that character the next time I want to "point left" or "point right". Please take to heart what I've said about leaving comments alone. EEng 00:09, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Your opinion on leaving comments alone does not align with my interpretation of WP:OWN, but since it's not at issue any longer, I don't see any point in discussing it. Feel free to write comments in the most natural way for you. -- Beland (talk) 00:15, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Excessive quotations?

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This article seems to contain a ton of quotations from various sources, some of which don't seem particularly relevant to describing Widener Library as an entity. The first sentence contains a direct quote to a 1998 article in which the library was described as having "vast and cavernous" stacks. That's neat, but I'm not sure why the opinion of one Harvard Magazine editor needs to be included in the main description of the library. Ditto for the quote about a sandwich and a whistle in the next paragraph, which is drawn from the opinion of the author's daughter in a collection of essays.

Thing is, the quotes are all well sourced - a lot of them just seem superfluous, and their presence strikes me as giving the impression of a WP:NPOV violation, despite probably not actually being one. Just dropping this here mainly to see if anyone else notices this. If not, I'll drop it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kalethan (talk • contribs) 05:59, 17 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Classification system

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I don't know a written source so can't add it, but there is a humorous explanation of the Harvard classification system, namely that it is by height of author.Bill (talk) 23:13, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Do tell. EEng 23:32, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Undergraduate traditions

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No mention of the well-attested undergraduate legendary tradition about having sex in the stacks at Widener?

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/10/have-sex-in-the-stacks-put/ https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-students-have-sex-in-the-library-2013-5 https://www.theunofficialguide.net/articles/the-unofficial-graduation-requirements https://harvardindependent.com/2016/09/impractical-traditions/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by AvidReader11663 (talk • contribs) 18:13, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Let's do a little calculation: 6800 Harvard undergrads * 13% claim to have done this (according to one link above) / 4 years to graduate / 365 days in the year / (regular academic year is 8 / 12 months) = 0.9 of such events per day, every day. Sure, yeah, I believe it. Anyway, there certainly is evidence that there's such a legend, but we're going to need a lot more than nudge-nudge wink-wink stuff from the Crimson and Let's Go to take the fact of this as reliable, and after that comes the question of whether it's worth reporting even then. EEng 07:25, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Titanic

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I'm not seeing an implication that the library was named for the sinking of the vessel. The Harvard Gazette's source in the article simply states as a headline "Widener Library rises from Titanic tragedy." Seasider53 (talk) 11:18, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • My edit summary [76] linked to the edit in question [77], which introduced the grammatically fractured image caption Harry Elkins Widener, who died in the RMS Titanic sinking in 1912, for whom the library is named. EEng 22:10, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Would it not be "for which..." if it was referring to the vessel? Seasider53 (talk) 01:10, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    That's why I said "grammatically fractured". As it stands it makes no sense, and the obvious correction turns it into a false statement. EEng 12:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edits

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I have reverted a large series of changes made almost entirely without edit summaries, and which in many cases are inexplicable. They clearly did numerous undesirable things, such as:

  • Introducing gibberish such as Gore Hall, constructed in 1841 as Harvard's library, which was describes as "disgrace­fully inadequate" library, Gore Hall, completed in 1841 and Widener Library houses approximately 3.5 million books is the center­piece of the libraries.
  • Making a caption read
    The Memorial Rooms, which feature "}}}}}}
(That's exactly how the caption reads.)
  • Forcing all images to the right and making them all the same size -- so that some are way to large, some too small, ,and most are now far from the relevant text.

And that's just a few.

Several diffs (e.g. [78]) are so chaotic it's impossible to tell what they do, and almost none have edit summaries; most are marked minor though almost none is anything like WP:MINOR. The fact that many edits scattershot the whole page meant that no edit could be individually reverted; nonetheless I examined each edit and retained the changes whose effect could be discrened and which seemed useful [79].

If someone still believes these changes to be helpful, they'll need to propose them here and gain consensus.

EEng 22:10, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, this same editor is now attempting to editwar his changes back in [80], without addressing the issues outlined above, and then continued to make even more inappropriate changes from there. As just one example of the absurdity of most of these changes, the text stating that Widener Library

was built by Eleanor Elkins Widener, his mother

was changed [81]] to read

its building was oveseen by Eleanor Elkins Widener, his mother

apparently because (according to an earlier edit summary [82]) "mom wasn't a construction worker". That kind of thinking borders on WP:CIR territory.

As before, almost all the edits are marked minor, which they are not, and only two or three have edit summaries. This time, I've reverted step by step, my edit summaries explaining in each case why the change being reverted is inappropriate -- see the edit history -- though I did retain the small number of edits that do appear to be useful (see here [83]). This required a lot of time on my part, in the hope that Keystone will see why his edits are unhelpful, but I'm not going to bother again: if there's a repeat of this behavior the next stop will be WP:ANEW. Large-scale edits like this, by an editor with such a bad track record, need to be discussed first.

EEng 03:47, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. A source has been offered [84] for the statement that Widener has works in 450 languages. This contradicts the well-known statement, made for decades (e.g. [85] and [86]) that the figure is 100. An informal bullet list, when it's in conflict with a serious writeup like those just linked, can't be considered reliable. I should have something definitive in a few days. EEng 04:13, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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