Cornell University Library

• 1. Introduction

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  Cornell University Library holds one of the most quietly astonishing collections in the Western world. Hidden inside its Carl M. Kroch Library is a copy of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln's own hand, the only privately owned version among just five known copies, accompanied by a transmittal letter from Lincoln himself and the original franked envelope he addressed. It sits alongside first editions of Darwin's Origin of Species, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and the Book of Mormon. How did a university library in upstate New York become home to such extraordinary things? And what does a library do with a mandate that stretches from cuneiform tablets to internet art, from French Revolutionary pamphlets to the archival tapes of video artists working in the 1960s? The answers reach back to the earliest days of Cornell itself, and forward into ongoing debates about how scholarship, science, and art survive in the digital age.

• 2. A Library Born with a University

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  Cornell University Library started as 18,000 volumes stored in Morrill Hall, a modest beginning for what would become a continental institution. Daniel Willard Fiske, the library's first librarian, shaped its character early. Under his direction, the library introduced the then-radical practice of letting undergraduate students browse the stacks and check books out directly. That openness set Cornell apart from its contemporaries. By 1885, the library had installed electric lights and kept its doors open twelve hours each day. Most university libraries of the era opened only a few hours per week, long enough for faculty to return and borrow books. Cornell's students could treat the place as a genuine reference library. Fiske and Andrew Dickson White, the university's first president, both eventually willed their entire estates to Cornell, deepening the institution's foundations. White's founding collection arrived in 1891, adding 30,000 volumes to what the Rare and Manuscript Collection preserves today.

• 3. The Scale of the Collection

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  As of 2014, the Cornell University Library held over eight million printed volumes and more than a million ebooks. More than 90 percent of its 120,000 periodical titles were available online. Beyond books, the library manages 8.5 million microfilms and microfiches, more than 71,000 cubic feet of manuscripts, and close to 500,000 other materials spanning motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files. That scale places it as the 16th-largest library in North America by volumes held, and the 13th-largest research library in the United States by both titles and volumes. The holdings are spread across 16 physical and virtual libraries on the main Ithaca campus, a storage annex for overflow, the Weill Cornell Medical College library in New York City, a branch serving Weill Cornell's Qatar campus in Doha, and the library of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. The University Librarian reports directly to the university provost, a structural choice that positions the library as an academic division rather than a support service.

• 4. Rare Manuscripts and Treasures

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  Cornell's Rare and Manuscript Collection dates to the university's founding in 1865, but it took its modern institutional form in 1951 when the Department of Rare Books was formally established. That department was absorbed into the broader Rare and Manuscript Collection in 1992, the year the current physical home in the Carl A. Kroch Library opened. The collection now holds more than 500,000 printed volumes and 20,000 cubic feet of manuscript materials. Among its most striking claims are superlatives that extend well beyond the Gettysburg Address. Cornell holds the largest collection on the French Revolution outside of Paris, and the largest collection in North America devoted to European witchcraft. The library also houses thousands of pamphlets produced during the French Revolution, the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, and a copy of John James Audubon's The Birds of America, one of only 120 complete sets known to exist anywhere. A 1651 first edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan also sits in the collection, alongside the witchcraft trial records and medieval books. The collection spans 14 main thematic areas, running from American History and Culture to Sexuality and Gender.

• 5. Open Science and Digital Access

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  Paul Ginsparg created arXiv at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a preprint server for physicists and mathematicians. Cornell University Library stepped in to provide stewardship and partial funding, and under its care arXiv grew into something that altered how researchers in those fields communicate. Posting an eprint before formal peer review became viable and popular in ways that were not possible before arXiv's reach expanded under Cornell's backing. A separate initiative, Project Euclid, takes its name from Euclid of Alexandria and pursues a different goal: connecting commercial mathematics and statistics journals with independent low-cost journals in the same fields, all through the internet. The aim is affordable scholarly communication and better interoperability between publishers. The Cornell Library Digital Collections offer a third front, bringing historical materials online. 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. Together these initiatives reflect a library that treats digital access as a core function rather than a secondary one.

• 6. The Rose Goldsen Archive

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  Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of the Society for the Humanities, founded the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in 2002. It is named for Rose Goldsen, a Sociology Professor at Cornell who was an avant-garde critic of pop culture, mass media, and communication. The archive sits within the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and focuses specifically on preserving new media art, a category that presents preservation challenges unlike those posed by paper manuscripts. Its general collection traces the transformation of new media art from analog to disc-based formats and then to networked and web-based work. Artists whose work is held there include Gary Hill, Chantal Akerman, Janet Cardiff, Michael Snow, and Nam June Paik, among others, with work ranging from the 1960s to the present. Special collections add further depth. The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, built through collaboration with the Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia at Cornell and the Dongtai Academy of Art in Beijing, contains 360 hours of videotape documenting Chinese contemporary art and performance from 1985 to 2002. The Experimental Television Center Archives, which the Goldsen Archive has hosted since 2011, holds more than 3,000 artistic videotapes and DVDs spanning from 1969 through 2011. Preservation is not incidental to the archive's mission. The Goldsen Archive is one of only six international digital art archives committed to coordinated preservation and documentation strategies, alongside institutions including Ars Electronica, the Tate Intermedia unit, and Rhizome Artbase. A National Endowment for the Humanities-funded initiative has worked to make complex interactive and digital-born artworks accessible on modern computers, a problem that grows more acute as the hardware and software environments of earlier decades become obsolete.