In 1754 King George II of England granted a charter for the establishment of King's College in New York City. For this purpose, the colony had raised more than 3,000 pounds sterling by public lotteries held between 1746 and 1751 and Trinity Church offered to deed some of its farmland in the city. Although King's College was the fifth college founded in the colonies, it differed significantly in that religion was not a requirement for admission. The main purpose of the institution was not the training of ministers, and the first president, Samuel Johnson, supported, albeit unsuccessfully, the offering of practical subjects that were particularly useful in the city's commercial community.
Despite Johnson's 1759 lament that "As to a library we have none...," the generosity of philanthropists created the foundations of a library shortly after the charter was granted. In 1754 Joseph Murray, a New York City lawyer, devised his residual estate, including a fine law library, to the college upon his death. Murray died in 1757 and his collection arrived at the college in 1759. Two years after Murray announced his gift, the Reverend Buncombe Bristowe, rector of All Hallows, Staining, in London, bequeathed his library of nearly 1,500 theological volumes to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to be given in turn to King's College. Although Bristowe died in 1758, the volumes did not arrive until 1763, and then only 1,200 were received. Thus, until 1763, the King's College Library was primarily a law library. A third major bequest came from Oxford University which in 1772 presented the college with approximately thirty volumes, representing all important works published by the Clarendon Press during the preceding several years.
As a result of this growth of the library, the Board of Governors appointed a librarian to catalog the holdings and account for the books. Robert Harpur, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the college, accepted the appointment at ten pounds per annum. If Harpur ever prepared the stipulated catalog, it has never been found. During these years the library had little direct relation to instruction at the college. By 1776 the library had approximately 2,000 books, largely gifts of donors which reflected their special interests. These books were inaccessible, inadequately cared for, and little used. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War closed the College and the entire library was taken to City Hall for safekeeping. Later that year, the British plundered City Hall and most of the books were scattered or destroyed. In 1777 the British issued an order for the return of the books, but it was ignored. To protect the remainder of the collection, the Reverend Charles Inglis moved what was left of the City Hall books first to Trinity Church and then, when the British burned the city, to his own home. Finally, in 1777 Inglis was forced to flee New York and he hid the books in a little-used chancel at St. Paul's Chapel. The entrance wall was later sealed up and the books remained there, undiscovered, until the early 1800s. Supposedly at that time, workmen replacing an organ came upon the collection. Historians differ about the number of titles found in St. Paul's; some say 300, others say between 600 and 700. Whether the books found all belonged to King's College Library or whether some also belonged to Trinity Church and the New York Society Library is also under dispute.
After the end of the Revolutionary War, King's College became Columbia College by an act of the State Legislature in May 1784. At first incorporated as part of the University of the State of New York, the College became an independent institution in 1787 with its own Board of Trustees. By 1795 the course of study included rhetoric and belles-lettres, mathematics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, Greek and Latin, Oriental languages, economics, French, and law. During the early years of the new nation the library benefited from four gifts. In 1792 the State Legislature voted �l,500 to the college to enlarge the library and the trustees ordered that surplus money from study-rents and fines be used to purchase books for the library. Then in 1805, Major Edward Clarke left �l,500 for books and the trustees gave $1,500 in 1811.
In November 1799 the trustees passed the first rules for the library, placing it under the joint care of the Professor of Languages and the Professor of Mathematics and Natural History. Use of the library was limited to trustees and the faculties of arts and medicine and their students. Only trustees, faculty members, or medical students writing theses could borrow more than one book at a time and all borrowers had to live in the city. The library was open every Saturday for one hour from twelve to one for lending and receiving and the professors in charge were expected to keep records of loans and delinquencies. With the reforms that swept through Jacksonian America in the nineteenth-century came changes in educational philosophy. The social and economic forces of an increasingly complex urban and industrialized society led to a demand for more practical courses of instruction. Education became more democratic, emphasizing universal literacy, civics as training for citizenship, and fundamental knowledge of basic disciplines for all students. During these years, Columbia's curriculum was revised to train students for careers in engineering, architecture, manufacturing, and mercantile and nautical pursuits.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth- century, the Columbia College Library was still not an essential adjunct to course instruction, and this was reflected in the appointment of a series of part-time librarians, who also held teaching positions, to maintain the collection. By 1835, sophomores were allowed to use the library. Up to that time only the two senior classes were permitted to use the library. When Nathaniel Moore became Librarian in 1837, he was the first regular incumbent in that position. He prepared a manuscript subject catalog of the library's holdings that lasted until the Reverend Beverly Robinson Betts published an author catalog in 1874. Still, the collection grew through gifts, deposits and purchases. In 1812, the College bought the library of Dr. Kemp, late Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Columbia College purchased about 300 books between 1826 and 1829 from Lorenzo Da Ponte, Professor of Italian Language and Literature. Da Ponte also deposited several hundred books in the library for the use of his pupils. These books form the basis for the Paterno collection now housed in Casa Italiana. In 1838 the trustees purchased President Nathaniel Moore's library, which was rich in classics, philosophy, and Italian literature.
By 1850 the library owned only slightly less than 13,000 volumes, ranking below Harvard and Yale, which had 50,000 volumes each. Part of the explanation for this was that Columbia had always relied on other libraries in New York City to augment and fill in gaps in its collection. The Columbia library existed to serve students, officers, and alumni, and was not intended as a circulating or general library. In addition, the College's librarians had a limited vision of their own roles and the scope of the library's potential.
Librarian William Alfred Jones described his philosophy of acquisitions as "selectness, rather than great extent." Until then no printed catalog existed; the library was open twice a week for a total of four hours, and only officers and upper classmen had privileges. In 1861 the books were arranged in ten alcoves, designated for theology, law, science, scientific journals and transactions, literary and critical journals, dictionaries and cyclopedias, Greece and Rome, history, ancient history, and literature. Besides the college library, the School of Law, established in 1858, and the School of Mines, established in 1864, had their own libraries. By 1876 the Law Library had 4,000 volumes; Mines had 7,000. Unlike the College Library, both offered long hours of service to users. Columbia College Library was soon to experience the revolution in library science that created the modern university library and turned the organization and administration of libraries into a profession.
The reforms of the early nineteenth-century gave way to industrial development and the rise of great fortunes. It was the era of the robber barons, waves of new immigration, and reform politics. Until this period, higher education in the United States resembled the course of study common in European preparatory schools. Education was a disciplinary process rather than an intellectual experience. Those who favored the inclusion of practical subjects were seen as supporters of narrow training. Whereas the first one hundred years of Columbia's existence were devoted to graduating disciplined gentlemen, the new education emphasized vocational training, public service, original research, management, and administration. Because philanthropists who supported higher education also supported the new philosophy, they served as catalysts for change.
In 1864 Frederick A. P. Barnard became President of Columbia College. A professional educator, Barnard set the stage for Columbia's transformation into a modern institution of higher education. During his life Barnard's philosophy evolved from advocacy of a curriculum designed to develop mental discipline to a more practical course of study that included electives.
The modern university library resulted from several simultaneous developments. Many scholars who were influenced by European institutions urged the creation of an American university system. This meant an expanding curriculum, increased enrollments, and the establishment of new specialized schools of study that would place great demands on library resources and space. The library would have to improve traditional services for undergraduates while accommodating the growth of research activity by faculty and graduate and professional school students. The major development, however, was the evolution of the field of library science that began at the 1876 meeting of librarians at the Philadelphia Centennial. At Columbia, these changes began under Frederick Barnard, were consolidated under Seth Low, and were expanded under Nicholas Murray Butler.
In 1876 the Columbia College Librarian was the Reverend Beverly Robinson Betts, and the collection numbered 31,390 volumes. Under Betts, the library made some substantial progress. Betts published the first author catalog of holdings, with a supplementary list of pamphlets, in 1874; directed the preparation of a catalog of the School of Mines collection; and in spite of the existence of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, compiled his own "Index of Periodicals and Series."
During Betts' tenure the library also made several important acquisitions, most notably the botany library of Professor John Torrey in 1873 and the Phoenix Collection in 1881. Columbia also agreed to accept the deposit of the libraries of other institutions, such as the New York Academy of Science, in return for reciprocal privileges.
Still, Betts was of the old school and the trustees who appointed him viewed his job as custodial. Betts resented people who borrowed books and he boasted about returning more than one-half of his annual book buying budget to the trustees. Although he tried to provide some reference services and performed his job diligently, he was unprogressive, uneducated about new developments, and never innovative. His unwillingness to expand his conception of the role of the library in the college curriculum and community led to his downfall.
For Columbia, the year 1876 was a watershed, as it marked the arrival of John W. Burgess as Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law. He proved to be the agent for changing Columbia and its libraries into a modern university system.
When Burgess arrived at Columbia he was extremely disappointed in the college and its library. An advocate of graduate education who encouraged the evolution of Columbia into a true university with professional schools, Burgess held that the materials he required for instruction and research could never be collected by someone with Betts's attitude. Burgess believed a properly equipped and efficiently managed library that made materials accessible to patrons on a daily basis was essential to his program and to the expansion of American higher education. Betts, in turn, resented Burgess's criticisms and aggressiveness. A conflict was inevitable.
With Barnard supporting him, the trustees gave Burgess a separate appropriation of $2,000 for a collection of books and documents in history, political science, and public law. Burgess consulted European and American scholars before purchasing 1,500 volumes to begin his library. A private donation enabled Burgess to hire an independent librarian and to keep the library open all day and six evenings every week. By 1880 Burgess had convinced Barnard and the trustees to establish a graduate School of Political Science and this resulted in 1890 in the formal founding of Columbia as a university.
With these new developments Columbia faced a critical shortage of space. In 1856 the College had moved from downtown to 49th Street and Madison Avenue, but expansion had already overwhelmed these facilities. Barnard encouraged the consolidation of the libraries of the College, the School of Mines, and the School of Law into one new building, for which funds were appropriated in 1881. Betts, unable to cope with these changes, had no involvement in the design of the building, which was conventional and which failed to incorporate any of the new architectural adaptations to the special needs of libraries. As a result, the building used space inefficiently, making it difficult to organize and reach materials, and was expensive to maintain.
In 1883 a library committee chaired by Frederick Augustus Schermerhorn presented a progressive report recommending the reorganization of the library, consolidating several collections in the new building. In fact, the committee's correspondence with leading innovative librarians is a rich archive on the activities and philosophy of library professionals during this changing time. Schermerhorn's report recognized the need for increased expenditures for acquisitions and administration, the creation of departments within the library, the restructuring of the staff with new job descriptions, the extension of hours, the encouragement of circulation, the combining of stacks and alcoves to provide space for growth, and the preparation of a card catalog. As a result of this report, the library staff was reorganized and Betts resigned.
To replace Betts, Barnard and Burgess supported the appointment of Melvil Dewey, whose philosophy had led to the development of library work as a profession. While a student at Amherst College, Dewey had developed his famous decimal classification system, which was first published in 1876. In that year, Dewey attended the library conference in Philadelphia; he was secretary of the American Library Association, the American Metric Bureau, and the Spelling Reform Association; and he edited the newly founded Library Journal.
Dewey's first task was the reorganization of the library staff and he proved to have an enlightened policy. In return for such benefits as flexible work hours, more varied assignments, regular holidays and vacations, and appropriate job titles, Dewey hired an excellent staff at low salaries. Included in his staff were six women who were recent graduates of Wellesley College. It was a daring step to hire women with neither training nor experience, and Dewey's education of his staff was the unofficial beginning of his library school.
Dewey concentrated on administrative reform, cataloging, improving reference services, and expanding interlibrary loan facilities. At first, his policies emphasized the safety and preservation of the collection, preparation of guides to the contents of the library, and expanded hours and services.
But the 49th Street building so recently opened was never large enough to satisfy the library's needs, and Dewey limited acquisitions to books on subjects taught in the College or those on subjects selected for special development. Most of the increase in collection size was due to the resurgence in educational philanthropy.
Dewey's tenure at Columbia gave him the opportunity to establish a School of Library Economy in 1887. Although the school's reputation grew and applications for admissions increased, the trustees were unenthusiastic about it and disagreed with Dewey's ambition to turn it into a school of library science that awarded degrees.
In fact, the trustees were increasingly critical of Dewey in general. They objected to the expense and slowness involved in organizing and cataloging the collection. Disagreements developed over his classification system, heavy appropriations, and arrogant attitude that led to poor relations with the faculty. In 1888 when Barnard resigned as President, Dewey � left without a defender � was suspended. He resigned and became Secretary of the University of the State of New York and Director of the State Library, leaving behind a collection of 87,295 volumes. In 1889, the School of Library Economy also moved to Albany.
Dewey's successor was George Hall Baker, during whose administration Columbia became a university. As a result of Dewey's difficulties with the trustees, the title was changed, the salary lowered, and the scope of the Librarian's activities limited to that of managing the library. Baker was a professional who had been librarian of Columbia's reader assistance department in charge of law, political science, and history since 1883 and who had lectured on the bibliography and literature of the historical and political sciences. He was particularly experienced in collection development; between 1883 and 1889 he had supervised library purchases.
Baker was especially interested in acquiring materials to meet the specific needs of university departments. He analyzed deficiencies in the collections, but his long-range plans for developing a balanced collection in all fields were thwarted by the lack of funds. Because of arrears in cataloging and space problems, Baker accepted gifts only if they could be treated as routine acquisitions. Among the gifts he did accept were the 685 volumes of Barnard's library; the books that formed the foundation of Avery Library in 1890; the new law library of Charles M. Da Costa in 1891, including English, French, and German classics; the Alexander T. Cotheal Library in the applied sciences; the John Strong Newberry Collection of geological books; the Otto van Struve Science Collection; and the Temple Emanu-el Library of Biblical and Rabbinical Literature. As for purchases, Baker bought only required volumes, society transactions, and periodicals.
Plagued by the lack of space, Baker urged the construction of a more practically designed library building. In 1895 Columbia President Seth Low gave one million dollars for a library to occupy the most prominent spot on the newly acquired Morningside Heights campus. The library, dedicated to Low's father, opened in 1897. Designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White, Low Library was the first building on the uptown site. The rotunda was an enormous reading room with 150 desks surrounding a circular reference desk where noncirculating reference titles were shelved. The main floor also had a periodical reading room and housed the general and union catalogs. The stacks were located above and below the main floor, with various reading rooms and specialized collections throughout the building. Although built to accommodate 750,000 volumes, it was unable by the early 1900s to provide sufficient space for readers, staff, and books.
Throughout Baker's tenure the conflict between centralization of the University's buildings and the maintenance of departmental libraries flared. Baker believed that centralization created a better and more organized library for patrons, but many departments believed research and course materials could be most readily available to students and faculty in department libraries. By 1899, the university had twenty-one department reading rooms located in many buildings on and off campus.
Despite improvements in organization, the growth of the collections, and the new building, Baker was increasingly criticized, particularly for his inability to delegate responsibility. He spent too much time personally reviewing acquisitions and supervising cataloging. He retired in 1899 under pressure. The collection had grown to 275,000 volumes.
Low chose James Hulme Canfield, the President of Ohio State University as Baker's replacement. Canfield was responsible for general policy, public relations, personnel questions, work assignments, and purchasing. Canfield believed that the perfect library served its patrons efficiently in pleasant surroundings with qualified staff. More than his predecessors, Canfield was concerned about staff salaries, staff turnover, academic rank (he became a professor on appointment), job qualifications, and retirement benefits.
During his administration the library grew to 434,194 volumes, but Canfieldfs purchasing policies favored graduate needs. He believed that a library of 10,000 carefully selected volumes could serve undergraduate course requirements and in 1907 the College Library was the first such library in a university to be designated solely for undergraduate students.
Canfield was opposed to the purchase of entire libraries because they often contained duplicates of materials already owned by Columbia. At the same time, however, even though the space shortage was acute, Canfield recognized the advantages of acquiring strong subject collections, and Columbia received on deposit the libraries of the New York Southern Society, the Holland Society, the American Mathematical Society, the Reform Club, and the Germanistic Society of America. Duplicates were weeded out by gifts, exchange, and sale. Canfield wanted a working library, not one filled with infrequently consulted rare books. He viewed the librarian's function as instrumental in directing researchers to appropriate sources of information in all libraries. Two of his innovations were printed Library of Congress cards for cataloging and typewriters to prepare them on. Until this time, catalog cards were handwritten.
During Canfield's time Columbia acquired a number of other significant collections, including the De Witt Clinton Papers, the Pierre Bayle Papers, and the Anton Seidl Memorial Library of musical scores and personal papers. In addition, the library received five endowments: the Law-Book Trust Fund, the Carl Schurz Library Fund for the German language and literature, the James S. Carpentier Fund for the School of Law, the Joseph Pulitzer Fund for journalism, and the Nathaniel Currier Fund for the general library.
In 1903 the trustees' committee on the library placed the libraries of all the colleges and schools that formed the University under the authority of the Librarian. This included Barnard College, with only a nucleus library of 120 volumes; Teachers College, with a collection of over 14,0000 volumes and 165 subscriptions; and the College of Pharmacy, whose library was not very accessible and whose books were largely uncataloged.
An energetic administrator, Canfield brought prestige, high academic credentials, and a concern for library organization to his tenure. He worked closely with the faculty in book selection and cared about his staff and the quality of service to researchers. His sudden death in 1909 left no apparent successor.
The trustees finally agreed upon William Dawson Johnston, who had been at Brown University, the Library of Congress, and the Bureau of Education. Johnston believed that a good library was one that was used and he encouraged accessibility of material, a specialized staff, and publicity concerning the library's holdings. During his administration the library began to use standard catalog cards with standard rules and subject headings. He emphasized reference services, raised personnel standards, and reclassified positions.
Among Johnston's more important acquisitions were the Samuel Johnson (first president of Columbia) Papers, the Frederick William Rolls Papers, the music library of James Fech, and the medical library of Edward G. Janeway. The collection soon grew to more than 500,000 volumes.
Johnston resigned in 1913 amid general dissatisfaction, particularly with his policy in the perennial dispute between centralization of holdings and departmental libraries. Johnston favored the latter and his detractors argued that this weakened the central collection, caused space problems all over the campus, and resulted in duplication and inefficient service.
From 1915 to 1926, the library had two acting Librarians, each of whom gave a portion of his time to the administration of the library system: Dean P. Lockwood, Assistant Professor of Philology, and William H. Carpenter, the Provost of the university. By the time of Charles C. Williamson's appointment in 1926, the library had more than one million volumes.
Even without full-time librarians these years were a period of remarkable acquisitions and improvements. Purchases included the Bushe-Fox Collection in English law, the Chinese collection, the first papyrus documents, and the first films. Gifts included the Marvyn Scudder Library, the Montgomery Collection, and the Daniel E. Hervey Music Library. In addition the medical library received assistance from the Robert Grosvenor, Abraham Jacobi, and Alexander Weinstein funds.
Under the presidency of Nicholas Murray Butler, 1902 to 1945, the library flourished. Cataloging became more efficient and cooperation with departmental librarians improved. Of special note is the development of reference service and the reference collection under the direction of Isadore Gilbert Mudge. The main reading room in Low was transformed into a reference library that included formal reference books and bibliographies, indexes, quotation books, books listing manuscript sources, and many frequently consulted volumes.
With Williamson's appointment the University ended years of decentralized library leadership and restated its commitment to professional service. Along with the selection of Williamson Dewey's library school returned to Columbia in 1926, where with the library school of the New York Public Library it became the School of Library Service.
The entire period from 1876 to 1926 was a time of extensive change and growth for the library. During these years Columbia established the foundations of its current superb law, medical, and business libraries, began the Chinese collection, formally organized the Columbiana Library, made the undergraduate library responsive to student needs, developed one of the outstanding reference collections in the country, and saw the emergence of Avery as the world's preeminent architecture library.
As always, space remained and remains a critical problem. With the generous gift of four million dollars from Edward S. Harkness of Standard Oil the construction of South Hall (later renamed Butler Library), which was designed by James Gamble Rogers, was begun in 1930. After South Hall opened in 1934, only special collections, the East Asian holdings, Columbiana, and the mathematics and general sciences books remained in Low.
The designers of Butler Library paid particular attention to comfort, lighting, safety, and preservation of the collections, and the building offered state of the art technology in these areas. The air-conditioned central stack core, consisting of fifteen tiers, was set off from work and reading rooms by brick fire walls. It was the largest bookstack ever constructed up to that time. Lighting in the stacks was designed by George Ainsworth to approach the quality of natural light. The system which was installed is considered to be a successful implementation of a design vastly superior to anything provided in the past.
Butler Library's storage capacity was designed to be more than two million volumes; the library system then owned 1,250,000. Butler was also to provide all technical operations, circulation and reference services, as well as to house five departmental libraries.
After 1940 the growth of the library began to decelerate and Columbia's collection size moved steadily down from third (Harvard, 4,159,606; Yale, 2,955,539; Columbia, 1,715,263). Some of the problems the Libraries faced were the continuing need to distinguish between research and general collections, the lack of funds to purchase new materials and to preserve old ones, and the competing demands of readers and materials for available space.
Over the course of the next forty years the Libraries continued to establish and develop collections and services which reflected the University's goal of sustaining a position of eminence in essentially all fields of professional and academic research and instruction. Warren ,J. Haas, who was University librarian from 1970 to 1978, was responsible for reshaping the Libraries into the dynamic organization it is today. During Haas's tenure the position of University Librarian was elevated to the Vice- Presidential level. In making this change the University demonstrated the high level of support it provides for its library and information services.
Following a landmark study of the organization of Columbia as a major research library in the early 1970s, a significant restructuring was implemented in 1974. The twenty-six library units in the Columbia system are now organized into three subject-oriented divisions (Humanities and History, Science and Engineering, and Social Science) and five Distinctive Collections, so-called because their collections are of unique depth and nationally significant excellence (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Augustus Long Health Sciences Library, Law and International Law Library, and Rare Book and Manuscript Library).
The principle underlying the assignment of twenty-one specialized units to three subject divisions was that scholars and researchers in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities require different sorts of library materials and services, and that library users would be best served by an organization which could be responsive to such differences in its planning, staffing, and collection development. Each division is administered by a Chief who is a subject specialist in the general field and who reports in turn to the Director of the Library Services Group. Among other responsibilities the Director of the Library Services Group coordinates services policies with the Librarians of the Distinctive Collections. As a general rule many of the subject-oriented department or professional school libraries in the divisions are maintained in quarters adjacent to or within the building housing the offices, classrooms, and research facilities of the primary clientele.
As University Librarian, Haas paid special attention to the process of management in an attempt to maintain an acceptable and responsive level of library performance despite several serious budgetary setbacks. During his tenure the first recording of collection development policies on a subject-by-subject basis for the entire library system was completed, the Preservation Department was established, the security of the collections was improved, and several service programs, including bibliographical data base searching, unified publications, and bibliographic instruction, were instituted or expanded. In the late 1970s the Law Library withdrew as an integral part of the Libraries system, although it remains actively affiliated.
The greatest expansion of space since the move from Low Library into Butler Library has occurred since 1960, during the tenure of Richard Logsdon. In this period the University constructed six new buildings that allowed for extra library space by moving some collections, thereby allowing for the expansion of others. The Engineering Library which began in the Mines Building (now Mathematics) moved to the Seeley W. Mudd Engineering Building in 1961, allowing the Math/Science Library to move from Low Library into the vacated space. The Law Library which had been in Kent Hall since 1908, moved to the new Law School Building in 1961. The East Asian Library was able to leave Low Library for Kent. The Business and Economics collections moved from Butler Library to the newly constructed Uris Hall in 1964.
The School of International Affairs Building was opened in 1971, and the International Affairs Library (later to become Lehman Library) moved there from Butter. It was joined in 1979 by the Social Work Library, which had moved first from the Carnegie Mansion on East 91st Street to the Reading Room in Butler Library. In 1976 an extension was added to Avery Library, providing space for the Fine Arts and Ware collections. In that same year the new Health Sciences Library was opened, providing seven times the space previously available. Most recently, in 1981, the Biological Sciences Library moved from Schermerhorn to the new Sherman Fairchild Center for the Life Sciences. In the early 1980s the facilities occupied by the East Asian Library in Kent Hall were considerably expanded and renovated.
As early as 1900 there was an awareness at Columbia of the need to solve the growing problems of rising resource costs, deterioration of library materials, the lack of available space, and the competing library needs of the many disciplines represented at the University. There was also an increasing recognition that the library would never be able to collect all materials needed by users.
By 1911, the Libraries had established what amounted to a cooperative collection development program with the New York Public Library which consisted of NYPL submitting its newest acquisitions for Columbia faculty to review for purchase by the University. At the same time, these libraries produced a Union catalog containing information on the important collections of all metropolitan libraries. By the early 1970s, Columbia Libraries' participation in cooperative endeavors had grown to include the Farmington Plan, Public Law 480, the National Union Catalog, the New York State Interlibrary Loan Network (NYSILL), and the New York Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency (METRO). The most significant recent cooperative venture is Columbia's charter membership in the Research Libraries Group (RLG), which aims for more effective management and greater accessibility of the resources necessary for the scholars in its member institutions.
Today Columbia's holdings total more than 5 million volumes, more than 2.5 million microform units, and 22 million manuscript items; nearly 60,000 serials are received. The Libraries also provides access to a wide range of information and data resources, including multimedia and computer based services.
Under the direction of the current Vice President and University Librarian, Patricia Battin, the Libraries is expanding the delivery of and access to scholarly information through the use of developing technologies. The Libraries' staff, without diminishing respect for the past, looks firmly to the future. The history of the Columbia University Libraries reflects, and will continue to reflect, the history of education and scholarship, the needs of society, and economic realities.
Avery Hall
280-3501
The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library collects materials to serve primarily the Art History and Archaeology Department and the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. The latter includes the Division of Urban Planning, the Division of Historic Preservation, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. The library is named for Henry Ogden Avery, one of late nineteenth- century New York's promising young architects and a friend of William Robert Ware, who had founded the Department of Architecture at Columbia in 1881. A few weeks after Avery's premature death in 1890, his parents, Samuel Putnam Avery and Mary Ogden Avery, established the library as a memorial to their son. They offered 2,000 of his books, mostly in architecture, archaeology, and the decorative arts, many of his original drawings, funds to round out the book collection, and an endowment to assure the continuous growth of the library.
Within five years the collection had grown to 13,000 volumes and Edwin Robinson Smith, a sculptor, was named the first Avery Librarian. In 1895 Samuel Putnam Avery funded a 1,139-page printed catalog that has since gone through two editions in book form (1958, 1968), with three supplements (1972, 1975, 1977). The catalogs are now union catalogs, organized by author, subject, and selectively by title, of all art and architectural books in the Columbia Libraries.
In 1897 Avery Library moved from an alcove in the 49th Street library building into a new wing in Low Memorial Library on the Morningside Heights campus. In 1912 it became the first library to abandon its quarters in Low for its own building, Avery Hall, a new Renaissance building by McKim, Mead, and White. This final home of Avery Library was the gift of Samuel Putnam Avery II, son of the original donor.
Throughout its history Avery has had a succession of eminent librarians. The archaeologist and historian William Bell Dinsmore (1920-1926) established the separate Fine Arts Library and discovered and acquired some of Avery's most important architectural drawings, including Sebastiano Serlio's unpublished manuscript on domestic architecture, illustrated with his own drawings, dating from the 1540s. Serlio planned this to be the sixth book of his seven volume treatise on architecture. The manuscript was finally published in 1978 by the Architectural History Foundation.
From 1934 to 1945, Talbot F. Hamlin, an architect and one of the country's leading architectural historians, was librarian. He was the first to solicit drawings from active firms and he began the systematic indexing that became the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. Maintained originally as a card file, this standard bibliographic tool has been published in two editions (1963, 1973) with three supplements (1975, 1977, 1979) and is now a computer data base available to scholars nationally through the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN). The index deals thoroughly with the extensive literature in architecture, architectural history, and the design aspects of urban planning found in all major architectural, art, and urban planning magazines published in the United States and Great Britain and in most of those relevant journals published in France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Japan. The Index is supplemented by the Avery Obituary Index of Architects and Artists, the second edition of which was published in 1980.
After the leadership of James G. Van Derpool (1946-1960), who emphasized the collection of rare books published prior to 1500, the library came under the direction of art historian and librarian Adolf K. Placzek (1960-1980). During these twenty years the library acquired 122 sketches and drawings by Louis Sullivan from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 23 drawings showing Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 1764 plan for rebuilding the sanctuary of San Giovanni in Laterno, and a superb Frank Lloyd Wright collection.
Under such a series of distinguished leaders the library expanded beyond all expectation. In addition, unlike many European libraries, Avery suffered no losses and no gap in its development as a result of World War II. Consequently a shortage of space developed that was exacerbated by the revival of the department of art history under the chairmanship of Rudolf Wittkower and the development of both the Division of Urban Planning in the 1960s and the Historic Preservation Program under James Marston Fitch. In the fall of 1974 construction began on a new underground extension designed by Alexander Kouzmanoff, chairman of design at the School of Architecture. With the opening of the extension Avery Library also accommodated the Fine Arts and Ware collections, the latter comprised of urban planning and housing materials. With the extension the Library housed a total of 200,000 books, 50,000 drawings, and 25,000 letters and manuscripts.
Avery's collection is an unrivaled printed record of architectural thinking, including Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria (1485), one of the most complete collections of the writings of Vitruvius, Palladio, and Vignola, and the Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachi of 1499, which is the first printed book to contain architectural illustrations. Volumes of engravings of buildings and guide books form a very important part of the collection. Avery owns the majority of the books published in the field up to 1800 and is extremely strong in European works published after 1800. The Modern movement is particularly well-represented, with virtually complete coverage of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
The American collection is one of the most extensive in existence. It begins with the first pertinent book to be published in the colonies, Abraham Swan's British Architect (Philadelphia, 1775), and includes a large number of titles listed in H. R. Hitchcock's basic bibliography, American Architectural Books. In recent years the scope of the American collection has been expanded to include printed source materials not previously collected. These include early trade catalogs from the manufacturers of building products (1840-1950) and city "view books" (1870-1930), which provide extensive pictorial documentation.
The drawings collection was formed around the nucleus of Henry Ogden Avery's drawings and now contains approximately 100,000 drawings, photographs, letters, and manuscripts relating to architecture and architects. The focus of the collection is American architecture, with a strong emphasis on New York City and its architectural history. The growth of the collection has been particularly noteworthy in the past decade, during a time when the importance of original architectural drawings as prime, historical source materials and often as superior works of art in themselves has been generally realized. Included in this collection are several important archives: Richard Upjohn, Alexander Jackson Davis, Greene & Greene, Warren & Wetmore, Harold van Buren Magonigle, and Stanford White.
The Fine Arts collection has books on art history, painting, sculpture, drawing, and prints. Specifically, it includes catalogs of exhibitions and private holdings, all standard histories, a rich collection of critical works, books on artistic iconography, monographs on special subjects, and complete or nearly complete files of major international art periodicals. In the decorative arts, the Library has an outstanding collection on architectural ornament, textile design, mosaics, stained glass, metal work, wrought-iron jewelry, and ancient pottery.
300 Kent Hall
280-4318
The C.V. Starr East Asian Library is a major collection of approximately 465,000 volumes of Asian and Western language materials for the humanities and social sciences in China, Japan, and Korea. Originally located in Low Library, the library moved to Kent Hall in 1961, when the Law Library moved into the new Law School Building. The space in Kent was recently renovated and the facility was renamed in 1983 in memory of Cornelius Vander Starr, who was the founder of a major insurance group and who had a lifelong interest in East Asia.
The collection began in 1900 with a gift of Chinese books from alumnus and trustee William Barclay Parsons. In 1902 the Chinese Foreign Office added a reprint edition of the famous encyclopedia Ku chin t'u shu chi ch'eng. The University's formal commitment to collecting materials to support Japanese studies was the result of the 1927 gift of almost 600 books from the library of the Japanese Imperial Household obtained through the efforts of Baron Iwasaki of the Mitsubishi Company and other Japanese businessmen, peers, and scholars. This gift included extensive holdings of imperial publications from ancient times to the Meiji Period, most notably the 60 volumes of the Tale of Genji and the 105-volume encyclopedia Wakawan Sansai Zuye (1712). In 1931 the Japanese Culture Center gave Columbia its books, manuscripts, and other materials relating to Japan. Finally .in 1935, the Japanese and Chinese collections merged to form the East Asian Library, which also houses smaller holdings in Korean and a few items in the Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongol languages.
The Chinese collection is considered to be one of the finest outside of China and Japan in its diversity of materials and general usefulness. Comprehensive in scope it includes standard works, learned journals, periodicals, and the collected works of several hun dred authors. The library's holdings in Chinese fiction and drama are the most extensive in the United States and the material on family histories is a unique source of information for researchers. Nearly one-third of the world's extant materials relating to family genealogies can be found in the Starr Library.
For Japanese studies the library owns standard dictionaries, handbooks, and bibliographic aids. In determining acquisitions, librarians have paid special attention to the study of the historical sciences, philosophy, religion, the classics, and the theater. The collection also includes many literary works as well as studies of China by Japanese scholars. Students of art will discover an impressive number of screens, paintings, shrines, and scrolls.
The Kress Seminar Room, located on the library's lower level, was designed for students of art. A video screen and a specially constructed table on which to use folios facilitate study. The room also serves as an exhibition area for some of the library's art objects, which include early Chinese printing tools and emakimono scrolls.
Also of interest to the scholar is the library's rare specimen of the Koya edition of Buddhist scriptures and the Marquis Maeda's Sonkyokaku library of manuscript reproductions. The latter consists of 125 titles and 10 series of facsimile reproductions of rare books of the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) published by Kisho Fukuseikai. Among the library's archival holdings are the papers of the Institute of Pacific Relations and the extensive biographical files of the Research Project on Men and Politics in Modern China.
701 West 168th Street
694-3688
In May, 1769, King's College granted the first medical degree in North America. Although medical classes were interrupted by the Revolutionary War, the course of studies resumed in 1792. In 1814 the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which had been chartered independently in 1807, was merged with Columbia's medical faculty to become the Faculty of Medicine. The Faculty of Medicine also includes the School of Nursing (1937) and the School of Public Health (1919). In 1923 Columbia's School of Dental Education combined with the independent New York College of Dental and Oral Surgery to form the School of Dental and Oral Surgery of Columbia University.
Although announcements from the College of Physicians and Surgeons mention a library as early as 1818, the present collection began in 1928, when Nicholas Murray Butler ordered that all medical center departmental libraries join the Physicians and Surgeons library to form a collection of 50,000 volumes. Space had long been a problem in the library, but new facilities were not opened until April 26, 1976 at West 168th Street and Fort Washington Avenue.
The collection of the Health Sciences Library, which is of national importance, is particularly strong in anatomy, anesthesiology, biochemistry, dental and oral surgery, nursing, occupational and physical therapies, oncology, pathology, plastic surgery, and public health. The library's holdings exceed 375,000 volumes. Journals are a major strength of the library; approximately 3,300 titles in many languages are received. The library's goal is to have available a research collection in the basic clinical sciences and in the principal branches of health care, as well as in all other areas of research at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
The Special Collections section of the Health Sciences Library contains several thousand rare and historical books, periodicals, pamphlets, museum objects, and archives in the health sciences. The collection is one of regional and national significance in many subjects, but of particular importance are its holdings in anatomy, comparative anatomy, anesthesiology, and plastic surgery. Of note are the nearly complete collections of all editions of the works of Vesalius, Harvey, and Tagliacozzi; 23 incunabla; and most of the classics in the history of medicine.
Several major private libraries form the core of the rare book collections. The Lena and Louis Hyman Collection in the History of Anesthesia includes 133 landmark works related to the development of modern anesthesia. Of particular importance are books by Henry J. Bigelow, Gardner Q. Colton, William G. T. Morton, and Horace Wells. The Sigmund Freud Library contains approximately 1,000 books, many of which belonged to Freud and bear his signature and marginal notes. In addition to most editions of Freud's own writings, there are classics in neurology and psychology from the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, such as the collected works of J. M. Charcot and Havelock Ellis.
The George Sumner Huntington collection in anatomy includes works by Berengarius, Eustachius, Harvey, Ketham, and Vesalius; fourteen incunabla; and many splendid examples of anatomical atlases from the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth- centuries. Works by the ancient and medieval physicians, such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, and more than fifty sixteenth-century books are highlights of the John Green Curtis Collection, which focuses on physiology.
The Jerome P. Webster Library of Plastic Surgery is possibly the most comprehensive library of its kind in the world. Books by Ryff, Galvani, and Carpue; multiple editions of Tagliacozzi; and a unique prescription record manuscript with Tagliacozzifs signature are some of the treasures of this collection.
The Special Collections section also houses many important archival collections. These include the Florence Nightingale Collection, which contains more than 200 letters written by Nightingale, and books and memorabilia associated with her; the Physicians and Surgeons Memorabilia Collection of publications emanating from or featuring the Faculty and the College of Physicians and Surgeons and its affiliated institutions; the June Lyday and Samuel T. Orton Collection of approximately 4,000 case records pertaining to learning disorders; and the patient records from the office of Jerome P. Webster.
300 Law Building
280-3743
The Law Library at Columbia University is the third largest in the United States, with a collection of more than 700,000 volumes. Although the university always had a significant law collection, beginning with Joseph Murray's donation of his library to King's College, the study of law, which began with the appointment of James Kent as Professor of Law in the 1790s, failed because most aspiring lawyers chose to train as apprentices to practicing lawyers.
In 1858 the Law School was established under the deanship of Theodore W. Dwight, independent of the college. Dwight succeeded in laying the foundations of a great law school, but because he advocated the lecture method of instruction as opposed to the case method, he did not view the library as an integral part of the program of study and he neglected its development. Until 1883, to accommodate students who were also apprentices to law firms, the law school was located in lower Manhattan near to the Astor Library, which supplemented its collection. It later moved to the 49th Street library building.
The real expansion of the Law Library began as a result of a series of changes in the 1890s. First, the law program was expanded from two to three years of intensive study; second, William Albert Keene, a strong advocate of the case method, became professor and then dean; and third, the university moved to the Morningside Heights campus.
Originally housed in Low Library, the law collection soon outgrew its new surroundings and moved with the School of Law into Kent Hall in 1910. Three years later Frederick C. Hicks became librarian and was largely responsible for developing it into a modern research library. Hicks believed that the law collection should serve as a research library for scholars as well as a working library for students; that the holdings should include Anglo-American books and foreign and international titles; that the library should acquire rare titles; that the collection should be cataloged; and that a reference service should be started.
Hicks's successor was Miles 0. Price, who served until his retirement in 1961. During Price's tenure, the library expanded to meet the new demands of the modernized curriculum, which called for studying law in the framework of political, economic, and social developments. Under Price the library acquired strong holdings in international law, legal history, and New Deal government documents. In 1961 the library moved with the School of Law into a new building on Amsterdam Avenue. During the late 1970s the Law Library came under the administrative jurisdiction of the School of Law.
The Law Library today houses approximately 250,000 volumes of foreign law. The most complete collections of international legal literature cover France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and selected countries of Latin America. In 1983 the library received an especially fine collection of works in Japanese law, and is in the process of developing holdings of the legal literature of modern Japan and China. In addition, the library has rich holdings in Roman law and English legal history. It is one of the few libraries in the United States with an extensive set of the laws and decisions of the Russian imperial and provisional governments as well as those of the Soviet government.
The world output of legal literature published in serial form, such as statutes, reports, and periodicals, is well-represented among the approximately 12,000 volumes added to the Law Library each year. About 10 percent of the total collection is on the subject of international law, foreign policy, international organizations, and related subjects. The library has a strong collection of books and documents on the European Common Market and has been a depository for United Nations documents since that organization's founding.
6th floor East, Butler Library
280-2231 (Library Office); 280-3528 (Reference)
In 1930 the trustees of Columbia University approved the creation of the Department of Rare Books to preserve and make available to researchers the libraries' expanded holdings of rare materials. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library now owns 500,000 rare books and 22,000,000 manuscripts in nearly two thousand separate collections. Many of the rare books are not only important to researchers in specific disciplines, but are also significant as illustrations of the development of printing and the graphic arts. The Library has grown primarily through gifts made by individuals, and through endowments established by donors, alumni and the Friends of the Library.
The Rare Book Department houses material in all disciplines, except law, art and architecture, health sciences, and East Asian languages and literature. The general rare book collection and the individual book collections are particularly strong in English and American literature and history; classical authors; children's literature; the development of education; mathematics and astronomy; economics and banking; photography; the history of printing; and New York City politics. In addition, the general rare book collection contains significant holdings of American literary annuals, American music and hymnology, European political movements, manuscript catalogs, Edwardian and Georgian poetry, the Beat Movement, polar exploration, and the writings of such authors as W. H. Auden, James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Crane, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerhart Hauptmann, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, and Walt Whitman.
The Manuscript Department's holdings are especially rich in English and American history and literature; American publishers and literary agents; business and banking; librarianship; international affairs organizations; social work; Columbia alumni, faculty and activities; and the performing arts.
Park Benjamin Collection of Knickerbocker Literature Presented to Columbia in 1940 by Benjamin's son, Evarts, this collection of New York imprints between 1840 and 1865 includes extensive holdings of first editions of works by Washington Irving, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Timothy Shay Arthur, among other Knickerbocker authors. Book Arts Collection
Assembled through purchase the Book Arts Collection covers all phases of book production. Begun in 1938, when Columbia acquired the American Type Founders Company Library, it contains more than 150,000 volumes divided into two parts: books with information about book production and books that are examples of fine printing and illustration.
Approximately 1,000 volumes tracing the development of standard measures in all countries dating from the fifteenth century, comprise the Dale Library. It supplements the Smith Collection of measuring instruments and printed books.
The Dramatic Museum and Library includes the 5,000-volume Brander Matthews Dramatic Collection, which is particularly strong in English and American drama, nineteenth-century acting editions of plays, works by and about Moliere, and materials relating to Augustin Daly. In addition, the museum contains nearly 80,000 autograph letters, manuscripts, prints, photographs, pamphlets, clippings, playbills, and programs dealing mainly with nineteenth-century American and English theater. It also houses the Joseph Urban theater models, and a number of models representing both historic theaters and contemporary stage design, including the Roman Theatre in Orange, France (2nd century A.D.), The Globe and Fortune Theatres, London (1600), and stage settings from The Return of Peter Grimm (Belasco Theatre, 1910) and Grand Hotel (National Theatre, 1920).
Presented to the University by Solton and Julia Engel in a series of gifts, the Engel Collection has more than five hundred books, manuscripts, and original drawings: most of the volumes are noteworthy association books and first editions. The researcher can find a complete run of Jeremy Bentham's writings; works by Poe, Whitman, and Kipling; and two variant states of the first American edition of Alice in Wonderland, published in 1866. The Engel Collection also has a fine copy of the first printed edition of Marco Polo's account of his voyages, issued in 1477 by F. Creussner, with the woodcut frontispiece portrait colored by hand at the time of the printing. Other treasures include the first issue of Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses inscribed by the author to his sister-in-law, Nellie Frances Van de Grift, and the first edition, first issue, of Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz inscribed by the author to his sister Mary Louise Brewster.
In 1925 Edward Epstean, the president of the Photo-Engravers Board of Trade of New York, began giving material to the Chemical Library. Then, in 1932, he donated his collection of 300 books on the history of photography and its application to the reproduction of type, pictures, and objects. This collection on the history of photography and the photomechanical processes of reproduction also includes three libraries bought by Epstean: those of Joseph Maria Eder, founder of the Graphische Lehrund Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, William Gamble of London, and the bookseller Gumuchian of Paris. The holdings are particularly strong in the specialized fields of printing processes, color and orthochromatic photography, and the chemistry of photography.
There are 8,000 books and 450 periodicals, primarily printed in English between the eighteenth- and twentieth-centuries, in the Historical Collection of Children's Literature. The core of the collection came when the New York State Library School moved to Columbia in 1926. It also includes the Velma V. Varner Collection, the Bertha Gunterman Collection, the Mabel Louise Robinson Collection, and the Frances Henne Collection of McLoughlin books.
The Holland Society Library, on deposit at Columbia, deals with Dutch settlement in New York in the early seventeenth-century and includes many early Dutch books, especially editions of Grotius.
Received in 1942 the Bronson Howard Collection consists of 1,500 volumes on the theater, and includes biographies of theatrical people as well as editions of many plays.
The Rare Book Room's holdings include 1,100 titles and is one of the finest collections of incunabula in the United States. These titles are especially strong in editions of classical authors, humanist texts, and fine printing. Among the more famous items are the "Book of Revelations" from the Gutenberg Bible, ca. 1454-1455, and the 1458 Canon Missae, one of three recorded copies and the single most important volume in the library.
Established by Acton Griscom around 1920 the collection consists of 1,700 volumes dealing with Joan of Arc and the period in which she lived. It is one of the outstanding collections of its kind in the world and includes several fifteenth- and sixteenth- century manuscripts, as well as books of poetry, fiction, and drama centering on Joan of Arc.
In 1942 Edwin Patric Kilroe gave the Library his collection of 104,338 items on the history of Tammany Hall. It includes newspaper clippings, posters, cartoons, campaign literature, badges, books, pamphlets, and Kilroe's own manuscripts on the his-tory of Tammany Hall and his correspondence in assembling the collection. There is an extensive collection of campaign biographies of Horace Greeley, Fernando Wood, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel J. Tilden, and Woodrow Wilson, among others.
In 1944 Mrs. Gonzalez Lodge gave the library 2,000 volumes of books by Greek and Roman classical authors printed between the fifteenth- and nineteenth-centuries collected by her late husband, Professor Lodge. One great treasure is the first collected edition of Homer's works published in Florence around 1488. The collection is especially strong in its holdings of works by and about the Roman playwright Plautus.
The bequest of Stephen Whitney Phoenix in 1881, the 4,000 volume Phoenix Collection is rich in literature, the classics, emblem books, illustrated books, and books on travel. Of special note are a first folio of Shakespeare, the first five editions of Walton's Compleat Angler, first editions of Chaucer and Jonson, several rare editions of Herodotus, and manuscripts of Thomas Chatterton, Robert Fulton, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Many of the books are notable for their bindings.
George A. Plimpton, whose collection of 16,000 volumes and 300 Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts came to Columbia by gift in 1936, was a successful textbook publisher who was interested in tracing the development of subjects taught in schools and universities. He collected rare editions and manuscripts of the texts used by past students and scholars in the pursuit of learning, such as books on grammar, penmanship, mathematics, music, geography, and astronomy. In addition to a collection of horn books, the holdings are rich in Latin, Greek, and early English and American textbooks. There is also a 30-line fragment of a grammar printed by Gutenberg, ca. 1454-1455, at about the same time as the 42-line Bible.
One of the most complete sections is on arithmetic. Plimpton had acquired an unequalled collection of arithmetic textbooks printed before 1600, including one of the six known copies of the Treviso arithmetic of 1478 and a copy of the first arithmetic printed in English, the Ground of Artes by Robert Recorde. Scholars will also discover important manuscripts of the thirteenth- through fifteenth-centuries devoted to the study of numbers and various methods of calculation. Included in the large collection of manuscript and printed editions of Euclid's Elements is a Latin manuscript on vellum dating from around 1260 with a commentary by Campanus.
A special feature of the library is a fine collection of copybooks, dating from the beginning of the study of penmanship.
In 1974, Columbia received the Mollie Harris Samuels bequest of books and manuscripts collected by her son, Jack Harris Samuels. The nearly 3,000 volumes include first editions, association books, and manuscripts covering English and American literature from the sixteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. The oldest item is the 1545 edition, the third collected edition, of The Works of Geffray Chaucer, printed in London by Robert Toy. The editions of English drama of the seventeenth-century are among the most notable books in the Library. These are nearly 200 quarto editions from the Elizabethan and Restoration periods, the rarest being the exceptionally fine copy of the first edition of Christopher Marlowe's The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, published in 1633. Virtually all of the major literary works of the eighteenth-century are present, including prized editions of the novels of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. Of special note are the more than 150 three-deckers of the nineteenth- century; a complete run of first editions of the works of Anthony Trollope; works by Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Stephen Crane; and nearly twenty first editions of plays by George Bernard Shaw.
The 50,000-item Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman Collection is one of the largest in the Library and includes manuscripts, broadsides, pamphlets, and first editions on economics and banking from the earliest printed books to the 1920s. Seligman began collecting in 1879 and his library remains one of the most extensive on economics in the world. Columbia bought part of the library from Seligman in 1929 and the remainder from his estate in 1942.
The library counts among its holdings one hundred incunabula dealing with trade and commerce; 1,000 broadsides from England, Scotland, Germany, and the United States; an almost complete run of rare English and American economics periodicals from 1815-1850; the complete works and reports of Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin; one of the most extensive collections of literature on canals, railroads, British foreign trade, money and foreign exchange, the mint, and early postage; the complete writings of Robert Owens; extensive holdings of United States eighteenth-century works on money, trade and finance; four hundred pamphlets that belonged to the Chartist Francis Place; a rich collection in early literature on the Bank of England and projects for land banks; and French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese economic writings from the sixteenth- to the nineteenth- centuries, especially concerning the physiocrats, the revolutions in France in 1789 and 1848, the German cameralists, and socialist writers and thinkers.
In 1931 David Eugene Smith gave Columbia his entire library of works on the history of mathematics and astronomy. Among the 10,000 books and pamphlets that record the development of mathematics from earliest times to the beginning of the twentieth-century are treatises from the fifteenth- to the eighteenth- centuries on astronomy and the calendar, particularly the adaptation of the Gregorian calendar and the calendar of the French Revolution. Smith also donated 2,000 manuscript documents which he collected because of their mathematical interest, but which are of importance to historians and legal scholars as well. Here the researcher will find a fifteenth-century manuscript of Sacro Bosco's De Sphaera Mundi and three fourteenth-century Arabic and Persian manuscripts: the algebra of Omar Khayyam, the astronomy of Al-Khowarizmi, and a translation of Euclid into Arabic. The Smith Collection also has 3,000 portraits of mathematicians. These range from original drawings to modern photographs, but most are steel engravings. In addition, there are 160 medals and portrait medallions and about 4,000 autographed letters of mathematicians.
Like his manuscript holdings, Smith began collecting Orientalia because of its relationship to mathematics. His interest in Oriental art grew and he acquired illuminated manuscripts and calligraphic specimens, including approximately fifty decorated manuscript Korans.
Finally Smith gave Columbia 275 mathematical and astronomical instruments dating from the fifteenth- through the eighteenth-centuries, including quadrants, astrolabes, armillary spheres, portable sundials, sets of weights used by money changers, measuring rods, and sector compasses. Smith's instrument collection is cataloged in the February 1930 issue of The Industrial Museum of New York.
The union of the Spinoza collections of Adolph S. Oko and Carl Gebhardt form Columbia's collection of 3,933 volumes of material by and about Baruch Spinoza. The collection contains seventeen seventeenth-century editions of works by Spinoza and six eighteenth- century editions. All of the first editions of genuine works and all printings known to have been made before Spinoza's death in 1677 are included.
The Rare Book Department houses Near and Middle Eastern manuscripts as well as cuneiform tablets, epigraphy specimens, and papyri.
In 1893 the library received the Temple Emanu-el Collection of 5,000 books containing 23 Hebrew incunabula and fifty manuscripts. In the 1930s a collection of 600 Hebrew manuscripts was purchased from the Vienna bookseller and antiquary David Fraenkel, which was added to 400 Hebrew manuscripts acquired by Columbia since the original Temple Emanu-el gift. The Hebrew manuscript holdings are relevant to the study of all aspects of Hebrew literature from the tenth-century to the present. Material from Africa, China, Greece, Iraq, Palestine, Persia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen covering every branch of Hebrew literature�the Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, commentaries, codes, responsa, liturgy, kabbalah, homiletics, philosophy, ethics, philology, mathematics, medicine, and science are especially significant to scholars. Special mention should be made of the Persian Genizah fragments; Oriental liturgical poems, hymns and lamentations; beautifully illuminated marriage contracts (ketubah) on vellum; and a large number of Hebrew, Greek, and Ladino manuscripts pertaining to the life of Jews in Turkey and Greece.
The library also houses 700 items from the third- century BC to the sixth-century AD in the papyrus collection. This includes two Homeric papyri and the "Karanis archive," which gives a detailed picture of the economic and social life of this Egyptian town during part of the fourth-century.
The cuneiform collection contains 600 specimens dating from 2100-300 BC, most bought by the library in 1896. They embrace the Sumerian, Id-Babylonian, Kassite, and Neo-Babylonian periods and present temple inventories, receipts, lists of laborers and wages, rations of agricultural products, student exercise books, real estate transactions, and loans. The most famous cuneiform tablet is the one relating to the "Pythagorean triangles." Dating from ca. 1900-1600 BC and in Old-Babylonian script, it proves that the Mesopotamians were aware of the principles of the theorem 1,300 years before Pythagoras.
The Rare Book Department also houses 400 Arabic, more than 100 Persian, and 32 Turkish manuscripts, most in the Smith or Arthur A. Jeffrey collections. In addition, the Smith Collection has 40 Sanskrit manuscripts.
In addition to the collections described earlier the following also represent significant printed holdings: American Institute of Graphic Arts Fifty-Books-of-the-Year, from 1923 to date; Hector Berlioz Collection, 400 volumes by and about the composer and his times; Arthur Billings Hunt Collection of American Music, comprising 3,000 volumes and 50,000 pieces of sheet music; Samuel and William Samuel Johnson Library, 1,500 volumes owned by Columbia's first and third presidents; Mary Queen of Scots Collection, 500 volumes; Robert H. Montgomery Library of Accountancy, 2,000 volumes; and Isidore Witmark Collection of Autographed Books and Music Scores, 400 volumes. The Rare Book Department also houses the Historical Map Collection, papyrus and epigraphy specimens, Rockwell Kent Collection of drawings and paintings, William Barclay Parsons Collection of Railroad Prints, and Arthur Rackham Collection of original drawings, paintings and sketchbooks.
The Manuscript Department is the University's major repository for collections of original papers, letters, manuscripts, and documents. It now contains more than twenty-two million manuscripts in nearly 2,000 separate collections. Because of the wealth of material in these collections, a listing of some of the more important holdings, organized by subject, will provide the best idea of the scope of the library's exceptional holdings.
Authors: W.H. Auden Papers, John Berryman Papers, William Seward Burroughs Papers, Gregory Corso Papers, Hart Crane Collection, Stephen Crane Collection, Paul W. Gallico Papers, Allen Ginsberg Papers, Herbert Gold Papers, H. Rider Haggard Correspondence, Jack Kerouac Correspondence, the Hellman Collection of D. H. Lawrence and John Steinbeck material, John Masefield Papers, Thomas Merton Manuscripts, Justin O'Brien Papers on contemporary French literature, Peter Orlovsky Papers, John Ruskin Letters, Sitwell Family Letters and Manuscripts, Tennessee Williams Manuscripts, and the Herman Wouk Papers.
Business Records: W. R. Grace and Company Papers and the Robert Hiester Montgomery Accountancy Manuscripts. The Montgomery Collection, which illustrates the history of attempts to solve problems basic in the development of accounting, includes instruction books, daybooks, wastebooks, journals, bankbooks, ledgers, receipt books, storage books, invoice books, registers, ships' logs, letterbooks, diaries, townbooks, tax roll books, articles of agreement, bills of sale, deeds, and wills.
Economics: Belmont Family Papers, John Bates Clark Papers, Wesley Clair Mitchell Papers, Henry Ludwell Moore Collection on Economics and Econometrics, George Walbridge Perkins Papers, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman Papers, and the Frank Arthur Vanderlip Papers.
Fine Arts and Graphic Arts: Rockwell Kent Papers, Arthur Rackham Papers, and the Typographic Library Manuscripts. The latter collection includes cataloged correspondence and manuscripts, uncataloged letters, financial records, and more than 200 patents for the design of printing types in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.
History: James Truslow Adams Papers, Frederic Bancroft Papers, Guglielmo Ferrero Papers, L. S. Alexander Gumby collection of Negroiana (contains clippings, pamphlets, photographs, pictures, manuscripts, and documents, including letters by Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington), Richard Hofstadter Papers, Allan Nevins Papers, James T. Shotwell Papers, and the John Brown Manuscripts of Oswald Villard.
Journalism and Publishing: Bennett A. Cerf Papers, Columbia University Press Papers, Curtis Brown Ltd. Papers, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Harper & Row Papers, W. W. Norton Collection, Pantheon Books Papers, Joseph Pulitzer Papers, Random House Archives (500,000 items), Paul Revere Reynolds Papers, Leah Salisbury Papers, John Schaffner Papers, Max Lincoln Schuster Papers, Lincoln Steffens Papers, and the Annie Laurie Williams Papers.
Language and Literature: Engel Collection and the Jack Harris Samuels Collection. Librarians: Melvil Dewey Papers, Maurice Falcolm Tauber Papers, and the Charles C. Williamson Papers. Medicine and Psychology; Elizabeth Blackwell Letters and the Otto Rank Papers.
Organizations: Pacific Relations Institute Office Files, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Office Files, Community Service Society Papers, League of Women Voters of the City of New York Papers, League of Women Voters of New York State Papers, and the Spanish Refugee Relief Organization Files.
Performing Arts: Bela Bartok Collection, Hector Berlioz Collection, Dramatic Library Manuscript Collection, Robert J. Flaherty Papers, Edward A. MacDowell Papers, Brander Matthews papers, Virgil Thomson Papers, and the Joseph Urban Papers.
Philosophy/Religion: Felix Adler Papers, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard Papers, Moncure D. Conway Collection, John Dewey Correspondence, and George Santayana Collection.
Political Leaders: Bella Abzug Papers, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo Papers, Sir Winston Churchill Collection, DeWitt Clinton Papers (correspondents include Aaron Burr, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Horatio Gates, Robert Fulton, Rufus King, Marquis de Lafayette, and John Quincy Adams), Alexander Hamilton Papers, John Jay Papers, Vi-Kyuin Wellington Koo Papers, Seth Low Papers, Gouverneur Morris Papers, Frances Perkins Papers, and the Harlan Fiske Stone Papers.
Political Science: John William Burgess Papers and the Nicholas Murray Butler Personal Papers. Science: Edwin H. Armstrong Papers, William Brown Meloney-Curie Papers, the David Eugene Smith Professional Papers, Nicola Tesla Papers, and M. I. Pupin Papers.
Sociology and Social Work: Paul F. Lazarsfeld Papers, Mary E. Richmond Papers, James G. Phelps Stokes Papers, Lillian D. Wald Papers, and Whitney M. Young, Jr. Papers.
Founded by the distinguished historian Allan Nevins, Columbia's oral history program was the first of its kind in the United States and the first to micropublish transcripts of interviews. From its inception, the Collection's goal has been to preserve the knowledge, experiences, and recollections of prominent people in all fields, particularly of world leaders, by augmenting the written record.
The first oral history interview was conducted on May 18, 1948, when Professor Nevins interviewed New York civic leader George McAneny in his Upper East Side apartment. Today the collection covers topics of interest to scholars in all disciplines; over 5,000 interviews fill more than 500,0OO transcribed pages. Both Nevins and his successor, Louis Starr, who directed the collection from 1956 until his death in 1980, developed guidelines, qualifications, and restrictions to ensure the quality of the material collected and encourage its proper dissemination and use. These stipulations have helped shape the development of many other oral history collections around the world.
Oral histories provide primary source material for scholars. The purpose of each interview is to use personal recollections to augment public knowledge. The interviewees are individuals who have made history themselves or who have witnessed significant events. Some interviews center on the life of a particular individual. Others are parts of special projects that focus on an institution or topic from the perspective of different observers.
Columbia's Oral History Collection is both eclectic and extensive. Representative of the scope of the individual interviews in the collection are Frances Perkins on her years as Secretary of Labor, V.K. Wellington Koo on twentieth-century Chinese history, Millicent Fenwick on politics, George Braziller on publishing, Father Francis X. Murphy on religion, Ted Berrigan on poetry, Joshua Logan on films, Philip Jessup on law, Lee Strasberg on the theater, and Nikola Franges on the assassination at Sarajevo. More than 500 published books have drawn on the collection.
History and Culture
6th floor East, Butler Library
280-3986
Established in 1951, the Bakhmeteff Archive collects manuscript materials on the history and culture of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe; on communities of emigres from those countries; and on American relations with and views of those countries. In 1973 the Bakhmeteff name was added when the Humanities Fund, founded by Boris A. Bakhmeteff, was given to Columbia. Bakhmeteff was the last ambassador of Russia's 1917 provisional government to the United States.
The Archive contains approximately 1.2 million items in 900 collections. The holdings, which date from the seventeenth- through the twentieth-centuries, are invaluable for the study of the last decades of the House of Romanov, the political and revolutionary movements of the twentieth-century, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, World War I, the development of Russian industry and housing, and the lives of the Russian emigres after the 1917 revolution. Among major holdings from the nineteenth-century are letters of Russian radical leaders Aleksandr Herzen and Petr Lavrov. Important collections from the early years of the twentieth-century are the papers of Bolshevik Grigorii Aleksinskii and of statesman Sergei Witte. Scholars will also find hundreds of memoirs by people who fought against or otherwise opposed the Bolsheviks in 1917-20; these memoirs offer insights into the history of World War I, the disintegration of the Russian Empire, the chaos of the Civil War, and the lives of the millions of emigres. The Archive also has an extensive collection of materials relating to Russian emigre writers, artists, musicians, and scholars in the West after 1917, such as Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Pavel Miliukov, George Vernadsky, Aleksei Remizov, Fedor Shaliapin, and Mstislav Dobuzhinskii. Holdings on the early Soviet period and World War II (1920-1945) consist of letters, memoirs, and essays written for American research programs in the 1950s.
The Archive's collections include more than 30,000 photographs, dating from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth-centuries. Among these are autographed portraits of such figures as Lev Tolstoi, Ivan Turgenev, Sergei Rakhmaninov, Mikhail Fokin, and hundreds of others; a great many photographs documenting the lives of the Russian Imperial court and aristocracy in its last few decades; and albums showing the lives of ordinary people under both Tsarist and Soviet rule.
210 Low Library
280-3786
The only library unit remaining in Low Memorial Library is the Columbiana Library. The collection, which formally began in the 1880s, contains books, clippings, pamphlets, press releases, obituaries, diaries, photographs, portraits, drawings, maps, engravings, floor plans, matriculation books, and other memorabilia important to Columbia's history from its founding in 1754 to the present. The 20,000 books include histories, biographies, periodicals, and writings by Columbia scholars. The vertical files contain extensive data on the 1968 campus disruptions. Former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler's speeches are also here. The files cover affiliated and neighboring institutions, such as Barnard College, Teachers College, and St. Luke's Hospital.
The King's College Room is a memorial to the founding of the college, with original paintings, library books, and other items of pre-Revolutionary America. Although most of the original library was not recovered after the American Revolution, many volumes found from that collection are kept in the King's College Room. Recent searches in the main stacks in Butler Library have resulted in new discoveries of titles from the original bequests from Bristowe and Oxford University.
406 School of International Affairs
280-3060
The personal and professional papers of Herbert H. Lehman, lieutenant-governor, governor, and senator of New York and director-general of the United Nation's Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, are housed in the Herbert H. Lehman Suite. The 1,250,000 items include files of correspondence with every president from Hoover through Nixon, 300 of which are between Lehman and Franklin Roosevelt. Other correspondents are William Benton, David Dubinsky, Hubert Humphrey, Fiorello LaGuardia, George Meany, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson. Lehman's devotion to Jewish philanthropies is also reflected in this collection of documents.
The Lehman Papers is a multimedia archive. In addition to correspondence, there are approximately 200 scrapbooks of clippings, photographs, and speeches; microform copies of Lehman's official papers as lieutenant-governor, governor, and UNRRA director-general from other repositories; phonograph records; audio and video tapes; and oral history interviews with Lehman, Emanuel Celler, Paul Douglas, James A. Farley, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver, Roy Wilkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and George Meany.
In 1971, Columbia established the Herbert H. Lehman Suite to house this collection. The suite also contains the papers of Lehman's wife, Edith Altschul Lehman, and of some of his associates such as Charles Poletti, James G. McDonald, and Frank Altschul, totalling an additional 103,000 items.
280-2271
Butler Library houses the 1,500,000 volumes of Columbia University's general collection in the humanities (and in the social sciences prior to 1974). Financed by Edward S. Harkness and designed by James Gamble Rogers, it opened in 1934 as South Hall and was renamed in 1946 in honor of Nicholas Murray Butler.
Although traditional in its Italian Renaissance design, the building was equipped with the latest in library technology. The core of the library is the fifteen-tier steel-shelved stack, which was the largest stack ever built as a single unit at that time. The stacks were air-conditioned; stack lighting was designed by George Ainsworth to approach the quality of natural light; there was an electric book lift, an electric book conveyor, and a lighted call board behind the main desk to inform researchers that books were ready to be checked out.
The special strengths of the collection are in history, literature, and philosophy. Butler houses one of the strongest collections in the United States of books and periodicals pertinent to the study of antiquity. Examples of noteworthy materials are Monumenta Germanica Historica, which provides source material on medieval Germany, and the complete 388- volume Patrologiae Latina by Jacques Paul Migne, in which he attempted to publish the works of all Christian writers up to Innocent III. In addition, the library's holdings include extensive runs of European academy publications and works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics scholars. Present collection policy calls for continued acquisitions in all relevant languages at a level appropriate for advanced research in every area of classical languages., literature, and history, as well as medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek literature.
Researchers in United States history will find an excellent working collection that also includes material on literature, political science, and economics. In addition to scholarly monographs and general histories, the library owns many of the published writings of influential leaders and personalities. Documentary collections are virtually complete for the federal government and are strong for the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The library subscribes to most learned publications in this area and has short-run periodicals�some fairly obscure�of particular importance to local historians. In colonial and revolutionary history, the library owns the printed records of the colonies as well as standard collections of revolutionary documents.
Equally impressive are the library's holdings in English history, which include major modern works in political, constitutional, legal, economic, and social history as well as biography. Government publications include the statutes and statutory rules and orders, the Rolls of Parliament, the Lords' and Armorers' Journals, the House of Commons Papers (practically complete since 1820) with indexes', and virtually complete sets of Rolls Series and various calendars of rolls and state papers. The library also houses the publications of the important English historical societies. General English historical periodicals include the English Historical Review and the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research.
The library has purchased significant materials in Canadian history, which have been published since 1928, including printed archival materials and guides to sources issued by the Dominion and its provinces as well as the proceedings and publications of the Royal Society of Canada.
The student of French history will find extensive material on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic period, and the Third Republic. The holdings are strong in provincial and departmental histories and in the histories of specific cities and towns.
In German history the library has a broad collection of materials, including the principal works of major German historians, secondary material on the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, and a large number of German doctoral dissertations. Additional research holdings include standard German and Austrian periodicals, major collections of monographs (such as Historische Studien), and source materials in published form, such as the writings of Luther and Bismarck.
In addition to national history collections, Butler Library has excellent materials in economic history. The holdings include a large number of books in special fields from ancient to modern times, including agriculture, guilds, banks, labor, industries, and corporations. There is a wide range of periodicals, publications of historical sections of universities and learned societies in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, England, and the United States, files of government publications, copies of the major works of outstanding contributors to the history of economic thought, and a good collection of works of secondary writers.
Students of literature will also find the holdings in Butler extremely helpful. The English literature and language collection contains sets of the publications of scholarly societies, materials on history of the theater, the theater and performing arts, and particularly extensive material from the Romantic and recent periods. The Shakespeare collection includes sets of the Shakespeare Society Series and the New Shakespeare Society Series, the Shakespeare Association Bulletin, many translations of Shakespeare's works, and secondary works by European scholars. In linguistics the library owns periodicals and other serial publications and files of German and other European dissertations on the history of the English language.
Students of Germanic literature will find Jahresberich Uber die Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiet der Germanischen Philologie (since 1890) as well as the major general works. There is an extensive collection of books by and about Goethe and a strong collection in linguistic history that dates back to the eighteenth-century.
The third major strength of Butler's general collection is in philosophy and religion. The holdings are substantial in all branches of the subject and include the editions of the works of the major philosophers, most of the important critical editions of works by them, secondary books on the history of philosophy, biographies of individual philosophers, periodicals, and dissertations.
Smaller, but impressive, holdings include the Turkish collection, which was a gift from the Turkish government in the 1950s and is particularly strong in literature and the social sciences; Semitic languages material that includes seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Yiddish monographic literature; and a collection of Hungarian books in literature and the humanities.
Finally, the Russian collection deserves special note. In addition to the material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the holdings include stenographic records of the Communist Party, monographs, editions of the writings of Russian authors, and serials.
325 Butler Library
280-2241
Butler Library contains one of the largest reference collections of any library in the United States. In addition to housing the main card catalog for the entire Libraries system (including a separate serials catalog), the reference collection is in itself a major research tool. The expertise and dedication of Isadore Gilbert Mudge, who was appointed Columbia's first reference librarian in 1912, and of Constance M. Winchell and Eugene P. Sheehy, her able successors, are reflected in the depth and scope of that collection as is their emphasis on the importance of bibliographic excellence in relation to scholarly research. Mudge, Winchell, and Sheehy have edited the last six editions of the American Library Association's Guide to Reference Books, based largely on the Libraries' reference collections.
While subject bibliographies constitute the backbone of the Butler Reference collection, other significant strengths are an impressive number of current directories, guides, and handbooks; complete runs of foreign national bibliographies; a wide range of language dictionaries; general encyclopedias in the humanities and social sciences; a particularly strong collection of biographical dictionaries (current "who's who" volumes as well as retrospective dictionaries of national biography); English and foreign language quotation books; periodical indexes from all over the world; newspaper indexes; and a strong collection of alumni registers and lists of graduates of United States and foreign universities.
The subject bibliographies, however, comprise the most extensive part of the collection. The library acquires bibliographies in the whole range of the humanities and social sciences, and the collection includes numerous specialized bibliographies of a scholarly nature, as well as complete files of the ongoing standard bibliographies for the various subject disciplines. Basic bibliographies in the pure and applied sciences, and those of a historical nature in particular, are acquired selectively for the Butler Reference Department collection. This segment of the collection also includes bibliographies and union lists of newspapers and periodicals, and listings (often with abstracts) of American and foreign academic dissertations.
406 Butler
280-4710
Originally two separate libraries, Burgess/ Carpenter houses books in the humanities and social sciences on an instructional level; its collection is particularly strong in literature and history. John W. Burgess, the influential Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law, founded an independent Library of History and Political Science in 1878 because of his conflict with Beverly Robinson Betts, the University Librarian. After the move to Butler in 1934, this library was named for its founder. George Rice Carpenter was a Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, the author of biographies of Longfellow and Whitman, and the editor of an edition of Dante's letters. After his death in 1909 his colleagues established a library for graduate students in his memory. Opened in 1911 with a purchase of 500 volumes from Carpenter's personal library, it was part of the department of English until 1920. The library moved to Butler in 1934 and merged with the Modern Language Library in 1947. In 1956 Burgess and Carpenter merged with the Classics Library.
Masters' essays in history, literature, and the social sciences through 1972, when masters' essays were largely discontinued by the university and were no longer deposited in the Libraries, are housed in Burgess/Carpenter. Dissertations in literature and history continue to be shelved in Burgess/Carpenter, but social science dissertations completed after 1976 are in the Lehman Library; all economics and business masters' essays and dissertations are housed in the Business/Economics Library.
In 1972 the friends and family of historian Richard Hofstadter donated funds to refurnish a room in Burgess/Carpenter in his memory. Many of Hofstadter's books were donated to the Libraries; a majority of them was added to the collection in Burgess/Carpenter. The Hofstadter Room contains many of his own ritings in English and foreign translations. Interest in general materials about science and technology has been growing rapidly in recent years. In 1983 a small core collection of general science monographs and periodicals was established in Burgess/Carpenter. Although this is not a research collection, its holdings may be of interest to researchers in other fields who need general current background information in science and technology.
501 Butler Library
280-5328
The Microform Reading Room supplements the collections in Butler Library with its wide range of rare, unique, and unpublished materials, including books, manuscripts, newspapers, and doctoral dissertations. For example, in additional to the major national daily newspapers, such as the New York Times, the library also has substantial runs of the Atlanta Constitution (1868-1944), the Chicago Daily Tribune (1870-1946), the San Francisco Chronicle (1900-1943), and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (1837-1958) as well as 147 reels of the Underground Newspaper Microfilm Collection (1965-1973).
The collection includes numerous segments of the microfilm publications of the United States National Archives and Records Service, encompassing files of State Department diplomatic and consular dispatches and correspondence from other cabinet officers from 1789 to the present.
Scholars will also find many microform sets or series that attempt to reproduce the complete texts of all items in a given printed bibliography or library collection. Among Columbia's holdings in this category are Early American Imprints: 1639-1800, based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography; English Books: 1475-1640, based on Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue; and Travels in the Old South, based on Thomas D. Clark's bibliography of the same title.
Finally, the library has microform copies of books, letters, and papers of individuals and organizations, complete runs of periodicals, and selected doctoral dissertations from schools other than Columbia. Some of the more extensive collections include: the Adams Family Papers; the American Colonization Society Records: 1792-1964; the letterpress books of Samuel Gompers and William Green; the American literary annuals and gift books: 1825-1865; the American Periodical Series I, II, and III: Eighteenth Century; the film title index from the British Film Institute in London: 1933-1968; Confederate Imprints: 1861-1865; correspondence and papers concerning nineteenth century riots and disturbances in Great Britain: 1812- 1855; the headquarters papers of the British army in America: 1747-1783; the Right Wing Collection of the University of Iowa Libraries; and the Oberlin College Collection of Antislavery Propaganda Pamphlets.
For a fuller description of Columbia's collection, see A Union List of Selected Microforms in the Libraries in the New York Metropolitan Area (1975).
701 Dodge
280-4711
In 1860 Columbia University recorded two music titles among its holdings: Hawkin's five-volume History of Music (1776) and Burney's four-volume History of Music (1789), both of which are still in the collection. The department of music, established in 1896 with the American composer Edward MacDowell as its first professor, purchased scores, recordings, and tapes for instructional purposes. The collection was augmented by the purchase in 1905 of scores and orchestral parts in the library of Anton Seidl, the famed Wagnerian conductor, and by a gift from James Pech of his extensive collection of vocal and and choral music in 1913.
Until the organization of the Music Library in 1934, music books were purchased by the Libraries and housed in the general stacks. Because there have been only three librarians in the forty-nine years since the founding of the Music Library, the collection is noted for the continuity of its development. The holdings are extensive and include historical editions, composers' complete works, facsimile and microfilm editions of manuscripts, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century operas, first and early editions of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and holograph scores of MacDowell, as well as a collection of first editions of his published works. The collection today totals over 80,000 items, including monographs, bound serials, masters' essays, librettos, scores, manuscripts, microform items, slides, photostats, phonorecords, phonotapes, and cylinders.
Of particular interest to researchers is the library's collection of zarzuelas. This large group of Spanish operas is believed to be a unique collection in the United States. Also of interest are two other collections: The Judah Joffee Collection of Historical Records, whose 3,000 discs and 100 early cylinder recordings represent a history of phonograph recordings from its beginning to the end of the acoustical recording era in 1925, containing almost every vocal recording issued from 1900 to 1925; and the Hertzman Collection which consists of photocopies of music manuscripts, with transcriptions and research notes. The library also owns the manuscripts of the compositions of Mrs. Eda Rapoport, a benefactress of the music department.
401 Casa Italiana
280-2307
Italian studies began at Columbia in 1825 when Lorenzo Da Ponte was hired to teach Italian language and literature. One of the most colorful figures in Columbia's history, Da Ponte was an adventurer, a remarkable linguist, a librettist, a friend of Casanova, and a lover of books and book collecting.
Born near Venice in 1749, Da Ponte later became dean of a seminary at Treviso, but as a result of a scandal he was banished from Italy in 1782. After a period of wandering he settled in Vienna, where he had a letter of introduction to Antonio Salieri. There he established his reputation as a librettist as a result of his collaborations with Mozart on Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790). After the death of Emperor Joseph II, however, Da Ponte was dismissed from court, going first to France and then to London (where he became involved in a series of financial speculations and legal feuds), and eventually to the United States, arriving here a poor man. A fortuitous meeting in a bookstore with Clement Moore brought an introduction to Moore's father, who was then Columbia's president. After the failure of a number of his business ventures, Da Ponte became the first Professor of Italian in Columbia College. Although the teaching arrangements were somewhat irregular and his relationship with the College was not always entirely satisfactory, he remained on the faculty from 1825 to 1837. Da Ponte's library of some 700 volumes became the nucleus of Columbia's Italian collection.
One hundred years after Da Ponte's appointment, Columbia began plans for a center for Italian culture. Designated as Casa Italiana, it was to have a library of 10,000 books, which Charles V. Paterno offered to support with a gift of $15,000. Paterno, a physician who never practiced medicine, and his brother Joseph made a fortune in the construction business. Casa Italiana was designed by McKim, Mead, and White and was built by the Paterno brothers.
Book-buying parties set out for Italy while construction was in progress and purchases arrived before the building's dedication in 1927. Within three years, the shelves were full, and by 1936 the library had one of the finest collections of Italian books outside of Italy. In 1937 Paterno and his son Carlo established a $30,000 endowment fund to enable the library to continue its acquisition activities in this area. In 1972 5,000 Italian history books were moved to the main stacks in Butler Library to create additional space in the Paterno Library, where the major emphasis of the remaining 15,000 volumes is Italian literature.
607 Butler
280-3543
Although officially founded in 1926, the School of Library Service dates back to Melvil Dewey's School of Library Economy. In 1926 Columbia approached Frank P. Graves, the New York State Commissioner of Education, about transferring the school from Albany back to Columbia, where it would merge with the school of the New York Public Library. The Board of Regents agreed, and in 1927 the School was established in East Hall. Charles C. Williamson became Director of the Libraries and Dean of the School of Library Service, and it was not until 1953 that the trustees voted to separate the two positions.
The School of Library Service Library is considered a "library of record" because the collection has been carefully and comprehensively acquired over a long period of time in far more depth than would be necessary for classwork or local research interests alone. An attempt has been made to acquire all substantive publications in the field of library and information science in the United States as well as a generous representation of foreign publications, especially those from Great Britain and Europe. The col- lection is preeminent in the field internationally.
The library's 100,000 volumes and current subscriptions to more than 3,000 periodicals concentrate on the following subjects: library administration, history of libraries, bibliography, documentation, library education, publishing, the history of books and printing, conservation of materials, archives and records managements, and bibliographic data base management and administration. Of particular interest to the scholar is the Graphic Arts Collection, which began in the 1930s with the purchase of the library of the American Typefounders Company.
In 1962 G. K. Hall published the Dictionary Catalog of the Library of the School of Library Service. A supplement was published in 1976. For the past few years catalog records have been recorded in the Research Libraries Information Network data base.
601 Fairchild
280-4715
As early as 1792 Columbia appointed Charles Latham Mitchell as Professor of Natural History, Chemistry, Agriculture, and the Other Arts Depending Thereon. Although courses in botany and zoology were taught at Columbia College, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the School of Mines during the next 100 years, it was not until 1892 that the university created the Faculty of Pure Science with departments in biology, botany, physiology, and other disciplines in science and mathematics. The creation of the faculty reflected Columbia's transformation into a university and the impact of the works of Charles Darwin and his interpreters. Thus by 1892, faculty and students recognized the need for a departmental library. The journals and texts that formed the core of the collection were purchased through gifts from Charles H. Senff.
In 1899 the graduate Department of Botany moved to the New York Botanical Garden (along with an herbarium and 7,000 volumes). In 1966 the Departments of Biology and Zoology were merged to form the Department of Biological Sciences. By that time the library was located in Schermerhorn Hall. In 1981 however, the library moved into the new Sherman Fairchild Center for the Life Sciences, designed by Mitchell/Giurgola, atop the Engineering terrace.
The Biological Sciences Library has some of the most modern microform equipment in the Columbia library system. To provide space for future growth, long runs of old and/or deteriorating journals were converted to microform. Plans are underway to initiate an audio-visual program to be used in conjunction with class and laboratory instruction, and a second program on the uses of Biological Abstracts, Zoologi- cal Record, and Chemical Abstracts is being developed.
452 Chandler
280-4709
Founded in 1900 and located in Chandler Hall since 1937, the Chemistry Library's extensive collection includes outstanding reference sets and complete files of the most important journals in the field. Particularly strong in organic chemistry, heterocyclic chemistry, colloid chemistry, spectroscopy, photochemistry, synthetic plastics, and electrochemistry, the holdings now total 35,000 volumes. The library also subscribes to more than 200 journals.
422 Seeley W. Mudd
280-2976
In 1865, a year after Thomas Egleston helped to begin the School of Mines, 824 essential volumes were transferred from the college library to the technical library in the 49th Street building. A printed index to the collection, prepared by the Librarian, John F. Meyer, was published in 1875. With the appointment of Melvil Dewey as University Librarian, however, this trend toward departmental libraries was halted.
The trend reversed itself after the move to the Morningside Heights campus in 1897. Egleston's own library was donated shortly before his death in 1900 and was consolidated with the department collection in 1931 to form the Egleston Engineering Library in the Mines Building.
By mid-century the library, as well as the College of Engineering, faced the familiar problems of inadequate space. Lesser-used materials were stored in Low, which in 1961 had 40,000 volumes, as compared with the only 25,000 in the active collection. In 1959 the University began construction of the Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Engineering Building, funded by grants from the Mudd and Ambrose Monell Foundations, as well as by a bequest from Henry Krumb. In 1963 the name of the library was changed to honor Monell.
The collection today contains more than 175,000 volumes In chemical, civil, electrical, Industrial, mechanical, and nuclear engineering; computer science; mining; metallurgy; materials sciences; plasma physics; and applied sciences. The library subscribes to 1,200 periodicals, mainly in English.
The holdings in civil engineering, one of the first areas to be developed, and in mining and metallurgy, which began with a gift from Egleston, are complete in periodicals and valuable historical books. Combined with the resources of the East Asian Library the University's material on Chinese and Japanese mining and metallurgy is extensive.
The Technical Report Center, which is housed in the Engineering Library, has more than 1,000,000 reports on federally contracted research projects by universities, colleges, industrial firms, private research organizations, and government agencies. This collection emphasizes aeronautics, astronomy, biological and medical sciences, chemistry, earth sciences, electronics, energy, engineering, mathematical sciences, nuclear science and technology, physics, and space science.
601 Schermerhorn
280-4713
The Geology Library was founded in 1912, when the department selected a librarian to organize the material housed in the offices of faculty members. With the creation of the Geoscience Library in 1949, the Geology Library became basically a teaching collection that emphasizes the fields of classical geology. Thus, the holdings are strong in economic geology, geomorphology, invertebrate paleontology, mineralogy, petrology, stratigraphy, structural geology, and sedimentology. The 90,000 volumes and 1,200 serials are rich in land expedition records, atlases, foreign and state geological publications and surveys, bibliographies, and conference meetings and reports.
Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory
Palisades, NY
914-359-2900, extension
208
The Geoscience Library is housed at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, an institute of Columbia that is devoted to research in the earth sciences. The observatory is located near Palisades, New York, on property that belonged to John Torrey, the famous botanist whose collection of thousands of botanical specimens was given to the university in 1873. The property, which changed hands many times after Torrey's death, was finally bought by Thomas Lamont who donated the estate to Columbia in 1948. At that time Maurice Ewing and a group of researchers were engaged in pioneering work at Columbia in seismology and marine geophysics, and they were allowed to use the estate to test sensitive seismic instruments. In 1949 the Lamont Geological Observatory was founded; the name was changed in 1969 in recognition of a gift from the Doherty Foundation.
The Geoscience Library is the graduate study and research center of the department of geological sciences. Begun informally in 1949 the library has been part of the university's library system since 1960. The collection consists of 20,000 volumes and 500 serials in seismology, marine biology, climatology, geochemistry, and geophysics. The library also houses 16mm films on oceanography and geoscience, and a significant collection of oceanographic scientific expe- dition reports. In recent years the library has also developed a map room. On the whole the collection is designed to support recent research trends and to advance interdisciplinary study. Both the Geoscience and the Geology Libraries avoid duplication of titles, and material is shuttled back and forth between libraries by a daily messenger service.
303 Mathematics
280-4712
The mathematics and science holdings are two distinct, separately maintained collections in the same library. Both existed as separate units when Butler Library opened in 1934, and in 1962, both moved into the Mathematics Building under the direction of one librarian.
The mathematics holdings exceed 25,000 volumes covering all aspects of pure math and statistics, including reference books, complete sets of French, German, Italian, and American abstract journals, a large collection of French, German, and British monographs and series, and the proceedings of international congresses. The library subscribes to 200 international periodicals.
The science collection consists of general and multidisciplinary materials in such areas as the history and philosophy of science and engineering. The holdings number approximately 70,000 volumes, of which two-thirds are lesser-used items kept in storage, and 200 current serials in a wide range of languages.
810 Pupin
280-3943
The Physics/Astronomy Library contains purely working collections in physics and astronomy. Begun as a separate departmental library in 1901, it owns 26,000 volumes (two-thirds devoted to physics and one-third to astronomy) and subscribes to 300 periodicals.
The physics collection is strong in classical and modern physics and has extensive material on theoretical high-energy particle physics. It is supplemented by the holdings of the Engineering Library which emphasize the practical applications of the discipline. The astronomy holdings are strong in descriptive astronomy and astrophysics and include a large number of astronomical and observatory bulletins and nautical almanacs.
409 Schermerhorn 280-4714
Begun in 1896, when Professor J. M. Cattell implemented his plan for a convenient workroom for graduate students, the Psychology Library became part of the Columbia library system in 1912. Known as the Psychology and Anthropology Reading Room from 1935 to 1951, it housed a reserve collection of anthropology books and journals because of the proximity of the departments and not because of subject similarities. In 1951 anthropology became part of Burgess, and the following year the Psychology Library was changed from a reading roon to a circulating library with a core reserve collection. The library owns 2,000 reprints and offprints of published research in all areas of visual perception and much original material in experimental psychology. The holdings total 26,000 volumes; the library subscribes to nearly 300 periodicals.
130 Uris Hall
280-3383
Following the establishment of the School of 1 Business in 1916, the Business Library began its official operation in 1919 within the School of Journalism building. It moved to the School of Business building (now Dodge Hall) in 1924 and again to South Hall in 1934. When Uris Hall opened in 1964 the Business Library, together with the economics collection from the Butler Library stacks, moved into its present Uris Hall quarters in a large space named for the former chief executive officer of IBM.
Today the Business/Economics Library contains one of the largest collections in the United States for the study of commerce, industry, finance, economics, management, and related fields. Its holdings include nearly 350,000 volumes, 325,000 microforms, and subscriptions to more than 3,100 serials, including many published in foreign countries.
The collection is particularly strong in central bank publications, international economics, labor and industrial relations, and the silver/gold currency question. Current acquisitions also include materials on the management and financial operations of non- profit organizations and organizations in the arts, such as museums and opera and ballet companies.
Of interest to many researchers is the Marvyn Scudder Collection of corporation documents. The Scudder Collection is believed to be the largest of its kind, with more than 3,000,000 pages of documentary material on the financial history and organization of thousands of United States and foreign corporations. These documents include annual reports, communications to shareholders, indentures, prospectuses, reorganization plans, and other corporate instruments dating from 1827. Begun in 1885 by Moses L. Scudder, the head of the Investor's Agency in New York, the Collection was inherited by Marvyn Scudder, editor of the Marvyn Scudder Manual of Extinct and Obsolete Companies and the country's most famous stock detective, and given by him to the Business Library in 1921. Particularly strong in documents from railroads, mining companies, and New York City real estate companies, the Scudder Collection has a complete file of material on the Union Pacific Railroad that begins with the original offering statements. The Collection is complemented by the Library's complete collections of Moody's Manuals and New York Stock Exchange Listing Applications and by its extensive holdings of contemporary corporate reports in microform. Some bond and stock certificates of interest to scripophilists are now in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
304 Journalism
280-3860
Around 1913 the Journalism Library was established, serving newspapermen, as a reference collection and a reading room with 100 leading American and foreign daily newspapers. The library now houses 14,000 volumes, an automated morgue, a current collection of more than 40 daily newspapers, 70 periodicals devoted to the subject of journalism, the complete New York Times since 1953, and a reference collection that includes 850 volumes, mainly comprising encyclopedias, dictionaries, quotation books, style manuals, indexes, geographical dictionaries, and atlases.
One of the most fascinating features and one of the most heavily used aspects of the library is the morgue. It was developed by Talcott Williams to serve as a portable encyclopedia of contemporary events. The file is a compilation of clippings from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Daily News, Christian Science Monitor, and Columbia Spectator that are organized in topical and biographical folders and kept for approximately five years.
Pulitzer Prizes are awarded annually by Columbia. The Pulitzer Prize Collection in the Journalism Library includes a copy of almost every publication that has won this prestigious award.
318 School of International Affairs Building
280-5087
The Lehman Library is a contemporary collection of more than 180,000 volumes and more than 1,600 current periodicals in the social sciences. It includes most materials acquired by the Libraries since 1974 in political science, sociology, social anthropology, and political and cultural geography. There is also a very strong collection of foreign newspapers, including much pre-revolutionary Russian material. Originally established for students of international affairs and area studies through the support of Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman and Mr. Frank Altshul, the library was designated as the university's social science resource center in 1974.
An integral part of the library is the Documents Service Center. Established in 1976 it receives seventy-five percent of the works available through the United States Depository Program, including books and new serials titles, as well as a substantial number of documents issued by the governments of Canada and its provinces. All United States Congressional documents beginning with the 94th Congress (1975) are available in hard copy or microformat. Other holdings include Foreign Broadcast Information Service daily reports and publications of the United States Joint Publications Research Service.
More than 185,000 maps and atlases in the fields of physical geography, geology, history, economics, and politics are housed in the map collection. Current acquisitions are selective, and responsibility for many titles in the field of geology has been transferred to the Geology and Geoscience Libraries. It is a selective depository for certain United States Geological Survey maps (including topographic maps), the United States Defense Mapping Agency, and the Canadian Geological Survey. Map service is provided through the Documents Service Center with the assistance of the Lehman reference staff.
Monographs in South and Southeast Asian vernacular languages under Public Law 480 are acquired as well as monographs in the fifty Soviet Central Asian languages. The 10,000 volume collection currently makes it the largest collection of its kind in the United States.
Research reports are collected extensively by Lehman, including all the reports of the Rand Corporation, selected reports of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and publications of the Heritage Foundation.
In addition, the archives of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which were begun by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1937 and ceased functioning in 1977, are housed in Lehman. The Bureau records include the files of more than 1,100 projects conducted during their forty-year history, as well as 750 articles by the staff, and files detailing Lazarsfeld's work.
One of the most useful collections in Lehman is the Human Relations Area Files, a microfiche collection of primary source materials on selected cultures and societies in the world.
The Information Files contain current journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, press releases, and hundreds of subject files, including Europe, a daily news service emphasizing politics and economics, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty analyses.
309 School of International Affairs Building
280-5159
The Whitney M. Young, Jr. Memorial Library of Social Work is the largest library in the United States supporting professional social work education. The holdings date from 1795 to the present, and incorporate the libraries of the New York Charity Organiza- tion Society, the New York State Charities Aid Association, the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York School of Philanthropy, and the New York School of Social Work. In 1975 the former Social Work Library was renamed in memory of Whitney M. Young, Jr., the distinguished social worker and civil rights leader.
Over 120,000 books and periodicals, covering the history and philosophy of social welfare, comprise the library collection. Special collecting emphasis is on alcoholism, community organization, corrections and court services, drug addiction, gerontology, health and mental health, industrial social welfare, intergroup relations, physical and social rehabilitation, social policy and planning, social security, social services, and social work. Special collections include the Brookdale Collection on Gerontology, the Dorothy Hutchinson Collection on Children, and the Meier Collection on Social Work.
Of particular interest to researchers are such works of historical importance as numerous volumes of Britain's Poor Law Commissioners, an extensive collection of publications from voluntary and public social service agencies and organizations in the United States, and a number of rare and out of print early works on social work and social welfare history.
Columbia is a charter member of the Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG), which is a corporation owned by the nation's leading universities and other research institutions. Currently there are over twenty-five member-owners, including Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the New York Public Library, and Stanford. RLG's activities are aimed at the constant improvement of the management and accessibility of the information resources necessary for the advancement of scholarship.
RLG is founded on the recognition that the resources available to individual libraries will not increase in the foreseeable future; that reductions in demand for library services are not likely; that the volume of information on which modern scholarship depends will continue to grow; and that in the decades ahead individual collections, regardless of their size and history, will be forced to move away from comprehensive acquisition policies.
RLG strives to:
(1) provide research institutions with a structure through which they can address common problems;
(2) provide scholars with increasingly sophisticated access to bibliographic and other forms of information;
(3) enable libraries to manage their catalogs in an automated mode and in the context of an automated union file of all member collections; and
(4) promote, develop, and operate cooperative programs in collection development, preservation of library materials, and shared access to research materials.
Columbia University Libraries participates in RLG's four principal programs.
(1) The Collection Management and Development Program: aims to reduce expensive duplicative purchasing by institutions while simultaneously ensuring that all material of research value in designated fields will be acquired by at least one institution. This program is a means to guarantee scholarship continuous support from the fullest possible collections of relevant material.
(2) The Shared Resources Program: develops policies to govern access by member libraries to each other's collections. These policies are more effective and more liberal than rules for conventional on-site access or interlibrary loan activities. Members commit themselves to give reciprocal on-site access to all qualified constituents of other member institutions, to give RLG interlibrary loan requests (which are transmitted via an electronic message system) priority, to lend normally noncirculating material to other RLG institutions whenever possible, and to expedite delivery and return of loaned items.
(3) The Preservation Program: treats preservation problems as an extension of collection develop ment, focusing on ways to identify, continually and systematically, materials in need of preservation, and on procedures for maintaining automated bibliographic control over micropreservation activities.
(4) The Technical Systems and Bibliographic Control Program: relies on components of the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN; see below) to review design requirements for new system development and to define standards for record creation and policies for effective, efficient record use.
In addition to these broad programs, RLG has developed several specialized programs in East Asian studies, art and architecture, law, music, medical and health sciences, and archives and manuscripts. Columbia University Libraries participates in all of these programs.
To help achieve its goals RLG uses RLIN, an automated information system. RLIN enables researchers to search a large machine-readable data base that includes not only the equivalent of their library's card catalog, but also the catalogs of other member and user institutions, plus machine-readable cataloging produced by the Library of Congress. As with conventional catalogs, searching can be done by personal name, corporate name, title, and subject heading. RLIN users however, can search by as many as twenty-nine specific access points, going far beyond the limits of information access in traditional catalogs. For libraries, RLIN assists in catalog management, interlibrary loans, and collection development.
Columbia's online public access catalogs (CLIO: Columbia Libraries Information Online), which will be available in the near future, will be based on Columbia's RLIN activities. RLIN also provides access to several special data bases, including the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals (which is produced at Columbia's Avery Library), an index to art sales catalogs (SCIPIO), the United States Government Printing Office Monthly Catalog, and the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (which is a file of publications printed in Great Britain and its colonies and of all items printed in English elsewhere in the world between 1701 and 1800). The Conspectus On-line provides access to a comprehensive subject-based assessment of member institutions' collections and collecting practices. RLIN can now also manage bibliographic records in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Current development work will enable the system to support the processing of manuscripts and archives and the management of bibliographic records in other non-Roman alphabetic scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, and Hebrew.