The Joseph Regenstein Library, offering tough love since 1970. (Photography by Anne Ryan)
The Joseph Regenstein Library has an average rating of 4.5 stars on Yelp, based on 22 reviews. Read what some satisfied patrons have to say.
★★★☆☆
The building itself is an eyesore.
★★★★☆
I haven’t had to use Interlibrary Loan for anything (okay, one thing, but only because someone destroyed the library’s current copy of Bernard Williams’s Moral Luck, probably on purpose, and they had to order a new one). And I’m the sort of person who will call the high school of my favorite writer and ask if they can send me their old literary magazines just so I can see what my favorite writers wrote when they were 14.
★★★★☆
Books? What books? Circa 2000 it was all about the second floor—frat boy and sorority girl heaven. By the time I was a senior I was in the fifth floor stacks desperately trying to complete my BA and graduate.
★★★★☆
I spent most of my undergraduate years being a loudmouth on the second floor. Back then the track team “zoomed past the shelves” dressed in nothing but stocking masks.
★★★★☆
In the decades since I frequented this amazing library, the massive card catalogs (primitive Googling, for you youngsters) have been cleared out of the first floor, making for a beautiful if underused first-floor lobby. They’ve also added a biodome-looking addition connecting to the west-facing side, but there’s no Pauly Shore inside.
★★★★☆
Brutalist architecture. Every book in the world. The raddest Helmut Jahn underground robot-crane operated glass-and-steel extension. I love this place!
★★★★★
The only improvement I could ask for at the moment is the ability to send a message to the person who recalled your very specialized book in a weird subfield, so that you can ask them a) WTF? and b) out for coffee …
★★★★★
It does not have that new library smell, and that is very much appreciated.
★★★★★
The place has multiple floors which dramatically increase in quietness as you go up. All of the librarians here are super sweet and nice and are more than willing to help you!
★★★★★
I hate libraries! Only over the last six or seven months have I come to love and not hate the Regenstein. Since becoming a big Regulator though, as a friend of mine calls it, I’ve figured this place out like the back of my hand.
★★★★★
I sleep better here than I do back at my dorm.
These actual Yelp reviews have been excerpted and edited for clarity and style.