FOR RELEASE: Feb. 14, 1996
Contact: Susan Sweetnam
The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is located underground in the Carl A. Kroch Library, three stories below the Arts Quadrangle. Here, in state-of-the-art, climate-controlled conditions, 300,000 printed books, more than 70 million manuscripts and another million photographs, paintings, prints and other visual media are available for students and scholars to use for their class work or research projects.
The recently acquired Johnson Family Papers, containing letters written by Abigail and John Adams to family members, can be found among collections that chronicle such fields as medieval and Renaissance studies, the Reformation, 18th-century France and England, American history, Anglo-American literature, Icelandic history and culture and the history of science. Other collections focus on agriculture, ornithology, witchcraft, women's studies, human sexuality, graphic arts and architecture and city planning.
But the Cornell Library is a great deal more than a repository of information. It is still - first and foremost - a living, working, ever-expanding scholarly resource open year-round for students, teachers and researchers from around the world.
Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White and Willard Fiske undoubtedly would gaze with wonder and pride at the library they established. They might also be pleased to learn that as Cornell Library anticipates the future, it is successfully using the latest technologies to make its growing resources more readily available to users. Catalogs and databases can be accessed at computer terminals in every campus library and from offices, laboratories and homes (24 hours a day); the Department of Preservation and Conservation initiated the "Making of America" project to convert much of America's recorded history, crumbling into dust due to aging paper, into digital form to preserve the documents and make them available to scholars and students via the Internet; and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has created a Web site (http://rmc-www.library.cornell.edu) of a "virtual expedition" that provides access to information about the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska through text, maps, images and sounds.
Cornell's founders envisioned "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Now - as then - outstanding and accessible library resources are crucial to the university that would achieve that purpose.
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Office: (607) 255-4886
E-mail: Based on the number of volumes in its collections, Cornell University Library is one of the dozen largest academic research libraries in the United States. It contains more than 5.8 million volumes, subscribes to about 61,500 periodicals, owns 6.8 million microforms, adds more than 120,000 volumes to its collections each year, and comprises 19 libraries throughout the university. Last year Cornell librarians conducted 4.8 million electronic searches for students and scholars.