Cornell University Library

The Cornell University Library is the

By 1885, the library had installed electric lights and stayed open 12 hours per day (instead of only a few hours per week—as most other libraries at American universities did at the time—just enough time for faculty to check out and return books), which allowed students to use it as a reference library.[8]

Initiatives

The library plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. It provides stewardship and partial funding for arXiv.org e-print archive, created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg. arXiv has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the eprint a viable and popular form for announcing new research.

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

The Cornell Library Digital Collections are online collections of historical documents.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

Rare holdings

The library houses several rare manuscripts. It houses one of the five copies of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)—the only such to be privately owned and the only one accompanied both by a letter from Lincoln transmitting the manuscript and by the original envelope addressed and franked by Lincoln.^[9] The library houses cuneiform tablets; a major collection of medieval books and witchcraft trial records; thousands of pamphlets produced during the French Revolution; and the correspondence between Jefferson and Lafayette.

It also holds a copy of

The Rare and Manuscript Collection is housed in the Cornell Library System’s Carl A. Kroch Library. With more than 500,000 printed volumes and 20,000 cubic feet of manuscript materials, the collection is vast and useful to the faculty and staff of Cornell University, as well as the public who can access any of the collection that has been digitized. The collection dates back to the university’s founding in 1865, by the first president of the university Andrew Dickson White. In 1891, the collection received its founder’s 30,000-volume collection. Specifically, the Department of Rare Books was founded in 1951 and was absorbed into the Rare and Manuscript Collection in 1992, the year the current physical location opened its doors. [15] The 14 main collections within the Rare and Manuscript Collection are the: American History & Culture, Architecture & City Planning, Asian History & Culture, Cornell University Archives, Digital Collections, European History & Culture, Food, Wine, and Culinary History, Icelandic History & Culture, Literature & Theater, Moving Images & Sound Recordings, Music, Photographs, Science & Technology, and Sexuality & Gender. ^[16] The Rare and Manuscript collection houses the largest collection on the French Revolution outside of Paris, the largest collection in North America on European witchcraft, America’s founding collection on the abolitionist movement, and the second largest William Wordsworth Collection.^[17]

Significant collections

Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art

Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art is a research repository for

Apart from the general collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art houses many special collections and fellowship competitions. Some of them are the following:
The Renew Media Fellowships in New Media, an annual competition for interactive dynamic media, was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in New Media Art from 2002. The Goldsen Archive serves as the repository for the digitized copies of this competition material, such as the proposals, slides, artists' portfolios, other supportive material, etc. from 2003 to 2008.^[21]
The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, a collaboration among the Goldsen Archive, the

Because of the fragility and the complexity of the artworks,

• Agriculture collections
  • The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture[33]
• Asia collections
  • Echols Collection on Southeast Asia^[7]
  • Wason Collection on East-Asia^[34]
  • South Asia Collection^[35]
• Cornell Hip Hop Collection^[36]
• Fiske Icelandic Collection^[37][38]
• Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH)^[39]
• Human Sexuality Collection^[40]
• Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL)^[41]
  Movies and photos of hundreds of working mechanical-systems models at Cornell University. Also includes an e-book library^[41] of classic texts on mechanical design and engineering.
• Making of America Collection^[42]
• Ornithology collection
• Race and Religion Collection^[43]
• The
  Rose Goldsen Archive of New media Art
  serves as a repository for many special collections and fellowship competitions, such as:
  • The Repository^[44] of the Experimental Television Center
  • Foundation Fellowships in New Media Art^[21]
  • The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art^[45]
  • The Lynn Hershman Leeson archive^[46]
• Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection^[47]
• Witchcraft Collection^[48]
• Other digital collections^[49]

Units

• Adelson Library (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
• Africana Library (Africana Studies and Research Center)
• Industrial and Labor Relations
  Library)
• Engineering Library (Carpenter Hall)
• Fine Arts Library (Rand Hall)
• Geneva Experiment Station Library
• Kroch Library: Asia Collections and Rare and Manuscript Collections
• Law Library
• Management Library (Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sage Hall)
• Mann Library
• Mathematics Library (Malott Hall)
• Medical Library (
  Weill Cornell Medical
  Library)
• Music Library (Lincoln Hall)
• Nestlé Library (School of Hotel Administration Library)
• Olin & Uris Libraries
• Physical Sciences Library (virtual)
• Veterinary Library (Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library)

References