In this bonus episode of The Unquiet Library: 50 Years of Robarts Library, host Jesse Carliner shares an oral history excerpt in which librarian Sian Meikle recalls the arrival of Wi‑Fi at the John P. Robarts Research Library in the early 2000s. Meikle describes staff concerns about the safety of radio frequency waves, the practical difficulty of providing wireless service in a massive concrete building packed with dense book stacks, and the ongoing, iterative nature of network upgrades managed in partnership with the university’s central IT team. She also notes a pandemic-era lobby bottleneck where hundreds of people using multiple devices required a WiFi hardware swap to handle demand. The episode emphasizes that maintaining access is continuous, often invisible work as devices and expectations evolve.
For more on Robarts’ history, visit uoft.me/robarts50 and follow @unquietlibrary on Instagram, Blue Sky, and TikTok.
00:00 Introduction
00:25 Why WiFi Matters
01:16 Early Safety Concerns
01:41 Concrete and Books Block Signals
01:58 Central IT Partnership
02:14 Pandemic Lobby Upgrade
02:52 Rising Demand and Devices
03:19 Conclusion
Sound credits:
2 08 Br Lib amb 5.wav by ERH -- https://freesound.org/s/51632/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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