Newberry Library
Newberry Library | |
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reference library | |
Other information | |
Director | Astrida Orle Tantillo |
Website | www |
The Newberry Library is an independent
Although the Newberry is a noncirculating library, it welcomes researchers into the reading rooms who are at least 14 years old or in the ninth grade,[2] and have a research topic corresponding to the nature of the collections. Additional public services are offered through exhibitions, meet-the-author lectures, adult education seminars, and other programming.
History
The Newberry was established in 1887 as the result of a bequest by Walter Loomis Newberry, an early Chicago resident and business leader involved in banking, shipping, real estate, and other commercial ventures. Newberry died at sea in 1868, while on a trip to France. He included in his will a provision of funds for the creation of a "free public library" should his daughters die without heirs. They did, and so, following the death of Newberry's widow, Julia Butler Newberry, in 1885, it was up to Newberry estate trustees William H. Bradley and Eliphalet W. Blatchford to bring the library to fruition.
Without much direction (Newberry did not leave behind many details regarding his vision for the library) and without its founder's personal collection as a foundation (Newberry's own collection of books perished in the
The Newberry's first librarian,
Poole and Cobb feuded bitterly over their different visions for the library building. Poole favored a number of reading rooms with open shelving of materials that could be easily accessed by patrons; Cobb preferred the majestic grandiosity in vogue in Europe and the centralization of collection items. Poole's influence with the library's trustees coerced Cobb to temper the grand staircase he had envisioned and to accommodate open shelving. Over time, however, the open shelving would put too much strain on the Newberry's staff and the security of its collections, and the library would convert to a centralized storage system.
Poole served as Newberry librarian until his death in 1894. Under his leadership, the library built broad reference collections that would be useful to many different Chicagoans, especially professionals and tradespeople. The Newberry's medical department, created in 1890, is an example of this emphasis. Poole also steered the Newberry toward the acquisition of rare materials for use by professional scholars. Two en bloc acquisitions made during his tenure, the private collections of
To focus its own collecting and to avoid the duplication of resources in Chicago at large, the Newberry entered into a cooperative agreement in 1896 with the Chicago Public Library and the John Crerar Library, by which each institution would specialize in certain fields of knowledge and areas of service.[4] As a consequence, the Newberry came to specialize in the humanities, and the natural sciences became the province of the Crerar. The Newberry immediately transferred its holdings in this area, including its copy of Audubon's Birds of America. The Newberry's medical department was transferred to the Crerar in 1906.[5]
Stanley Pargellis, the fifth Newberry librarian (1942–1962), emphasized not just the "passive" collection of materials but also the active orchestration of programs and events to encourage scholarly inquiries into the insights those materials might contain. Under Pargellis, a fellowship program was inaugurated and academic conferences were held at the Newberry, out of which emerged new scholarship using the library's collections.[6] Pargellis also expanded the scope of the collection. Understanding the important role corporations played in American life and believing that those corporations could only be properly assessed if their records were freely accessible, Pargellis started a trend across the library world with the acquisition of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company's private archives. Since this acquisition, in 1943, the Newberry would continue to add to its CB&Q archives, while collecting the records of other major corporations of the Midwest.
Between 1962 and 1986, the library was greatly expanded under the leadership of president Lawrence William "Bill" Towner. During this time, the Newberry acquired many important collections and a stacks building dedicated to the storage of collection items was constructed. Four new research centers were formed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The research centers continue to support and produce important scholarship in their fields, while providing programming for more general audiences. They are the Center for Renaissance Studies, the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, and the William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture. Under Towner the library assembled a major collection on Herman Melville and co-sponsored the Northwestern-Newberry Melville Edition.[7] The Newberry cooperated with the Chicago Historical Society in creating the 2004 Encyclopedia of Chicago, a landmark single-volume work that covered the city's history from 1630 to 2000.
In 2017–18, the lobby spaces of the library underwent a $12 million renovation to improve visitor access and exhibition space.[8]
Services
The library houses more than 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages, and 500,000 historic
The Newberry also offers a variety of exhibitions, meet-the-author lectures, continuing education classes, concerts, teacher programs, and other public programming related to its collections. Exhibitions have featured Daniel Burnham's famous Plan of Chicago of 1909, artifacts of World War I, and a crowd-sourced aggregation of materials related to love, from heart-shaped Renaissance maps to early twentieth-century American sheet music.
The Newberry's Research and Academic Programs Division offers short- and long-term fellowships for local, national, and international scholars, in addition to managing two separate semester-long seminars for undergraduate students. The four research centers foster, generate, and disseminate scholarship in their areas of focus: medieval, early modern, and Renaissance studies; American Indian and Indigenous Studies; the history of cartography; and American history and culture.
Reference staff are available in the Newberry's two reading rooms and in its third-floor reference room whenever the library is open. Reference librarians work with all readers and offer orientation, in-depth bibliographical instruction, and specialized assistance as needed. The library is open to all researchers over 14 years of age.
The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries Project, a historical GIS project that aims to map every county boundary configuration in the United States from the early seventeenth century to the present, is also based at the Newberry.
The Newberry Bookstore, located in the lobby of the library, curates a selection of books reflecting the Newberry's collection strengths and upcoming public programming, while offering other goods such as cards, posters, and literary action figures.
Newberry Library Award
In 1987, the Newberry established the Newberry Library Award in honor of its 100th anniversary. The Newberry Library Award is an honor bestowed to individuals, and in the case of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, organizations, who have made "outstanding contributions to the humanities, particularly in fields of endeavor related to the Newberry’s collection."[10] The award itself is a scale-sized model of the full-sized Virginio Ferrari sculpture created in 1987 called Umanitá that greets visitors as they enter the Newberry Library.[11][12][13]
- 1987: Paul Oskar Kristeller
- 1990: Jaroslav Pelikan
- Richard J. Franke
- Ann Ida Gannon
- Lawrence Stone
- 2006: Hanna Holborn Gray
- 2007: Richard M. Daley
- 2008: Anthony Grafton
- 2009: William Cronon
- 2010: Jonathan Spence
- 2011: Robert Darnton
- 2012: Francis Christopher Oakley
- 2013: David McCullough
- 2014: Roger Baskes
- 2015: Stacy Schiff
- 2016: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- 2017: Martin E. Marty
- 2018: Carla Hayden
- 2019: Marilynne Robinson
- 2021: Lonnie G. Bunch III
- 2022: Ira Glass and This American Life
- 2023: Ken Burns
- 2024: Drew Gilpin Faust
See also
- Bughouse Square Debates
- Newbery Medal, an unrelated award
References
- ^ "Newberry Library library, Chicago, USA". Libdex.
- ^ Administrator. "Resource Directory". chicagohistoryfair.org. Retrieved 2016-09-01.
- ^ William Landram Williamson, "William Frederick Poole and the Modern Library Movement," Columbia University Press, 1963.
- ^ a b Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). Encyclopedia Americana. .
- ^ "Cooperative Collecting in Chicago". Realizing the Newberry Idea. Newberry Library. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
- ^ Pargellis, Stanley (October 4, 1943). "General Statement of Library Policy". Minutes of the Newberry Board of Trustees.
- ^ Fritz, Meaghan (2017). ""The Coiled Fish of the Sea": A Brief History of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville". Incidental Noyes (November 22, 2017).
- ^ "Chicago's Newberry Library opens visitor-friendly renovation with new World's Fair exhibit". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- ^ Lauren Tousignant (14 July 2017). "Library seeks witches to translate 17th-century spellbook". New York Post.
- ^ "David McCullough to Receive Newberry Award". Newberry Library. March 2013.
- ^ "Newberry Honors Williams College's Francis C. Oakley with 2012 Award". Newberry Library. May 2012.
- ^ Koenig, Wendy; Badowski, Christine (10 September 2013). "Chicago Public Art: Umanita". Chicago Public Art.
- ^ Shah, Tina (20 February 2008). "Newberry Library sculpture stolen". Chicago Tribune.
Further reading
- Campbell, D'Ann, and Richard Jensen. "Community and Family History at the Newberry Library: Some Solutions to a National Need." History Teacher (1977): 47-54. in JSTOR
- Coale, Robert Peerling. "Evaluation of a research library collection: Latin-American colonial history at the Newberry." The Library Quarterly (1965): 173-184.
- Davis, Donald G. Dictionary of American Library Biography. "Towner, Lawrence William, 1921-1992."
- Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Culture & the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (University Press of Kentucky, 1976)
- Jensen, Richard. "The Accomplishments of the Newberry Library Family and Community History Programs: An Interview with Richard Jensen" The Public Historian (Autumn, 1983) 5#4 pp: 49-61 in JSTOR
Primary sources
- Butler, Ruth Lapham. A check list of manuscripts in the Edward E. Ayer collection (Newberry library, 1937)
- Mohr, Carolyn Curtis. Guide to the Illinois Central archives in the Newberry Library, 1851-1906 (Newberry Library, 1951)
- "Back to Adam," a Survey of Genealogy in the Western World as Illustrated N the Collections of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois: An Exhibition Catalogue (Newberry Library, 1992)
External links
- Official website
- Digital Newberry – online access to more than one million digitized items from the Newberry's collections
- Newberry Library on Encyclopedia of Chicago
- Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey selected news articles from the foreign language press from 1855 to 1938.