Cornell University Library

The Cornell University Library is the library system of Cornell University. In 2005 it held 7.5 million printed volumes in open stacks, 8.2 million microfilms and microfiches, and a total of 440,000 maps, motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files in its collections, in addition to extensive digital resources and the University Archives. It is the eleventh largest academic library in North America, ranked by number of volumes held.

Structure

The Library is administered as an academic division; the University Librarian reports to the university provost. The holdings are subdivided among twenty individual libraries, most of them on the main campus in Ithaca, New York. Olin is the primary research library for the social sciences and humanities. Mann Library specializes in agriculture, the life sciences, and human ecology. Other libraries focus on the arts, the physical sciences, law, management, labor, and other disciplines, and maintain facilities at the Ithaca campus, at the medical campuses in New York City and Doha, Qatar, and at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York.

Mann Library

The Mann Library includes the Home Economics Archive of Research, Technology and History [HEARTH], containing over 1100 books, journals, and manuscripts on home economics.

History

Initially, the system was a collection of 18,000 volumes stored in Morrill Hall. Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, donated his entire estate to the university upon his death, as did President Andrew Dickson White. Under Fiske's direction, Cornell's library introduced a number of innovations, including opening the stacks to undergraduate students, allowing undergraduates to check out books, and operating 9 hours per day from the earliest days of the library (instead of operating for only a few hours per week—as other libraries at American universities did at the time—just enough time for faculty to check out and return books), which allowed the patrons to use the facilities as a reference library.

Initiatives

CUL plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. The arXiv.org e-print archive, created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is operated and primarily funded by Cornell as part of CUL's services. It has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the eprint a viable and popular form for announcing new research.

The Project Euclid initiative creates one resource joining commercial journals with low-cost independent journals in mathematics and statistics. The project is aimed at enabling affordable scholarly communication through the Internet. Besides archival purposes, primary goals of the project is to facilitate journal searches and interoperatibility between different publishers.

The Cornell Library Digital Collections are online collections of historical documents. Featured collections include the Database of African-American Poetry, the Historic Math Book Collection, the Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection, the Witchcraft Collection, and the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection.

Significant collections Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection Witchcraft Collection Race and Religion Collection Fiske Icelandic Collection Asia collections Echols Collection on Southeast Asia Wason Collection on East-Asia South Asia Collection Agriculture collections The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH) Human Sexuality Collection Ornithology collection Making of America Collection Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) Movies and photos of hundreds of working mechanical-systems models at Cornell University. Also includes an e-book library of classic texts on mechanical design and engineering. Other digital collections

Units Adelson Library (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) Africana Library (Africana Studies and Research Center) Catherwood Library (Industrial and Labor Relations Library) Engineering Library (Cornell University College of Engineering, Carpenter Hall) Entomology Library (Comstock Hall) Fine Arts Library (Sibley Hall) Geneva Experiment Station Library Kroch Library: Asia Collections and Rare and Manuscript Collections Law Library Management Library (S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sage Hall) Mann Library Mathematics Library (Malott Hall) Medical Library (Weill Cornell Medical Library) Music Library (Lincoln Hall) Nestlé Library (School of Hotel Administration Library) Olin & Uris Libraries Physical Sciences Library (Clark Hall) Veterinary Library (Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library)