For five years the rows of inverted ice trays that light Lamont Library have hummed nearly 13 hours a day, six days a week, above the heads of studying undergraduates. This month the cork, steel and glass structure celebrates its birthday. With certain reservations, it has fulfilled the expectations of its planners as America's model college reading library.

Like all successful brain children, Lamont is celebrating its anniversary by functioning. Already this year it has served more undergraduates than in any previous fall term, and business has reached an all-time peak this reading period. A committee of 125 faculty members has finished weeding out and revising the list of titles in the collection, and the now titles have been published in the library's first printed catalogue. Boyond this, the library is expanding its services in new fields in an effort to attract more adherents. The young library is a robust and active five year old.

Lamont stands today as a concrete and practical solution to one of the University's longest-standing bugaboos--the problem of making its vast collection of books more readily accesible to students. With the influx of veterans following World War II, this problem became appallingly clear: although the University has a larger number of books than any other organization in the country except the Library of Congress, it was harder for the student to get his hands on an assigned text than at many smaller and less well-equipped colleges.

In 1946 and the years following, more than 4,000 undergraduates in addition to graduate thesis-writers and visiting researchers had to draw their books from Widener Library. With its closed stacks and complicated card files, the parent library could distribute texts in only two ways--through its regular book desk, or through the reference desk in its main reading room. Frustrated undergraduates would wait endlessly only to discover that the books they needed to read for an exam were unavailable.

No Room at All

There was a pressing need too for a place to study. The House libraries and Widener would overflow during reading and exam periods until every restaurant in the Square was full of cramming students. And still there was not enough room. It was time for a new library.

Lamont was designed to meet these needs. It was designed to work efficiently, and not only to provide the student quickly with those books he knew he wanted, but to bring him into contact with others by placing them in open stacks right before him. And it was designed to provide him with an ideal environment for study, writing, and casual browsing. In all respects but the last it has succeeded admirably.

When Lamont first opened its doors in January 1949, it was an immediate sensation because of the unique appearance of its physical plant. Hopes for the future and its hypothetical standing as a model undergraduate library were bruited about, but it was the miles of fluorescent lights, the cork floors, the little holes in the ceiling and its general glass-place appearance that made an immediate hit.

In an editorial marking the opening of the library, the CRIMSON repeated the old story of the man who went through four years of Harvard without ever stepping into Widener, heartily praised the air-conditioned heaven of Lamont, and ended with a declaration that the new library was not deserving of the same fate.

Submarine Atmosphere

But in the past five years some of the enthusiasm for blonde wood and plate glass has evaporated, and unfortunately for Lamont, its machine-like, often submarine atmosphere has proved the main deterrent to its complete popularity. Nevertheless, by and large, the story of these five years is a success story.

The history of Lamont's successes and failures to date does not lie in an enumeration of specific events or accomplishments as much as in the position it has come to occupy in the mind of the undergraduate. With the possible exceptions of Eliot House, Cronin's, and the General Education program, Lamont is the butt of more jokes and the locale of more stories than any other Harvard institution. Whether he loves it or loathes it, almost every student is acutely aware of it. In its first five years it has become a legend.

Whether this is exactly what they had in mind or not, the planners of the library have every right to be edified. Among the major ideals behind the conception of the library was the hope that it would make the students aware of books, and although the positive personality of the building itself sometimes overclouds the significance of its contents, it has made an impression that Widener never could have. The older building represents the abstract idea of the great library; Lamont is its working avatar.

Much of Lamont's workability lies in the limited number of books kept in the building. At its opening the library offered students 80,000 volumes chosen from course reading lists and other lists of the books most often demanded by college students. Since then the collection has grown to a permanent figure of about 100,000 books, which includes some 39,000 different titles.

The empty shelves in Lamont will never be filled if future librarians continue to follow the plans of present Librarian Philip J. McNiff. As the demand for certain titles drops off, extra copies of the books are shunted off to the Widener stacks through underground tunnels, and replaced by other titles for which there is an increasing need. This keeps the library--which, as McNiff points out, was designed for reading rather than research--down to what he considers "a workable size."