Cornell University Library
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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.[1] It is the eleventh largest academic library in the United States, ranked by number of volumes held.[2]
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[edit] Structure
The Library is administered as an academic division; the University Librarian reports to the university provost. The holdings are subdivided into twenty individual libraries, the largest of which, Olin-Uris, includes the John M. Olin and Uris Libraries, respectively the primary research and primary undergraduate libraries on the main campus in Ithaca, New York. The other divisions specialize in various disciplines, and maintain facilities at the Ithaca campus, at the medical campus in New York City, and at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York.
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
[edit] 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CUL plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents.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.
[edit] Significant collections
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[edit] Units
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[edit] References
- ^ Cornell University Library: Annual Report 2005 (PDF). Cornell University Library. Retrieved on 2006-06-05.
- ^ Top Twenty University Research Libraries Ranked By Number of Volumes Held. Association of Research Libraries. Retrieved on 2006-07-09.
