Central library of Shahid Beheshti University visit report

I will never forget about the first day I visited the central library of Shahid Beheshti University in which I’m studying English Literature. I needed a book about analyses on Rostam and Esfandiar story of Shahnameh, I asked my friend about the location of the central library and when I found myself in front of those horrible stairs, I realized how tired I was. But as I was going up the stairs I found a significant landscape on my left side, the yellow-colored autumn leaves had said goodbye to their mother branch, having freed themselves to fall on the green grass of the hill, then I thought of checking out a book from the library and sitting there and reading and enjoying it because that was the proper place to enjoy reading a book with a perfect silence mixed with the sound of the breeze moving through the trees’ leaves.

As the door was opened for me I could feel that special atmosphere in which you know there’s a big “be quiet!” and you won’t dare to say a word, there was a big hall for students to study, then the first thing that caught my attention was the way the tables were put in the hall, they were in different sizes, for a single student, or a group of students, I really loved the big round table in the center of the hall. The library had a separated big room for kids on the left side of the hall with smaller shelves of childlike books, the room was decorated with colorful small tables and small chairs, the wall was covered by a very big poster of the world’s map in green color, I was really wide-eyed when I saw such books like Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, but then I thought it is very good that they have different kinds of books, easy readings, a bit longer novels but with simple language, childlike small pieces of poems and coloring books. The place did give me the feeling of being a kid who loves to read books sitting on one of those four big balloons (actually, I would prefer the red one).

There is a conference hall next to the kid’s room where the students can use to present what they have worked on and studied on. In front of the conference room, you could see the electric door to the library, where the books are kept. As I was approaching the door the man asked me to put my bag in the shelves and reminded me that it is forbidden to take my bag with myself into the library. When I went indoors I found myself in the biggest library I have ever been to, there were two encasements in front of the bookshelves in which history books were kept, one of them was a book in which the spectacular picture of “hand over hand” was exhibited. The bookshelves were separated into two different groups: Latin books and Persian books. I headed down through the Latin books and I suddenly stopped as I saw the names: William Shakespeare, Bronte, Jane Austin and many other great writers whose books I love to read as soon as possible.

Then I checked the Dewey number of the book I wanted to borrow in the computer system of the library supplied there for the students to search the books they need and went through the Persian bookshelves to find it, with their accurate classification based on Dewey decimal classification I could easily find what I wanted. Holding the book in my hand I went up the stairs to see the place where the reference books were, there were too many heavy books there, big heavy dictionaries, encyclopedias, yearbooks, atlases, bibliographies and there was a separated place for thesis that students were not allowed to go there without the librarian’s permission.

Then I went the stairs down for about two storeys to see that part of the building where there are four rows of computers with which the students could check out the e-books and have the accessibility to a great number of databases, of course only the students of M.A and P.H.D were allowed to use them, the other part of that place was dedicated to the magazines and periodicals in easy access and a great archive of the old numbers.

I went up the stairs, again between the novels I was very excited about, I decided to choose one and take it with myself, so I chose “Persuasion” by Jane Austin and looked at its first page and went to the librarian happily. I sat on the green grass and started the first page of persuasion…