<p>CampusGrotto.com has put out a list of the most beautiful college libraries:</p>
<ol>
<li>Bapst Library, Boston College</li>
<li>William W. Cook Legal Research Library, University of Michigan</li>
<li>Suzzallo Library, University of Washington</li>
<li>Butler Library, Columbia University</li>
<li>Fisher Fine Arts Library, Penn</li>
<li>Chancellor Green Library, Princeton</li>
<li>Doe Library, UC Berkeley</li>
<li>Harper Library, University of Chicago</li>
<li>Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library, Vassar</li>
<li>Sterling Memorial Library, Yale</li>
<li>Firestone Library, Princeton </li>
<li>Powell Library, UCLA </li>
<li>George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University</li>
<li>Widener Library, Harvard </li>
<li>Special Collections Library, University of Virginia</li>
<li>Perkins/Bostock Library, Duke University </li>
<li>Riggs Library, Georgetown University </li>
<li>Bizzell Memorial Library, University of Oklahoma</li>
<li>Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester </li>
<li>Baker Hall, Harvard</li>
<li>Williston Library, Mount Holyoke College</li>
<li>Uris Library, Cornell </li>
<li>Monroe Library, Loyola University New Orleans</li>
<li>Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale</li>
<li>Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth </li>
</ol>
<p>Michigan’s Cook library is gorgeous. Whether it deserves to be among the top 2 or 3 depends on one’s opinion of course, but it is definitely beautiful.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve only really been in rare books library at Yale, fischer fine arts in Penn, and firestone at Pton. I would definately keep Yale where it is, give firestone a MUCH better rating, and give fine arts a worse rating.</p>
<p>I realize this probably isn’t the right place for this, but I was shocked to find that my current institution has only 2 libraries on campus. For those of you with experience seeing many medium to large size campuses, do you think this is unusual?</p>
Eh? Duke has more circulating libraries than that. Only 7 privates have more books.</p>
<p>West campus – Perkins/Bostock (main), Divinity, Law, Medicine, Business
East campus – Lilly (arts), Music
Other – Marine lab</p>
<p>There also used to be separate biology, chemistry, and engineering libraries, but I think they’ve lumped them all together since I’ve been there. That was a smart move, I think, as Perkins/Bostock is open 24 hours, whereas the small branch libraries were not.</p>
<p>There are also non-circulating libraries like the rare book collections and the department libraries.</p>
<p>The top 20 largest library collections
Harvard University 15,181,349
Yale University 11,114,308
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign 10,015,321
University of California–Berkeley 9,572,462
University of Texas–Austin 8,322,944
Stanford University 8,000,000
University of Michigan 7,800,389
Columbia University 7,697,488
University of California–Los Angeles 7,576,790
University of Wisconsin–Madison 7,232,850
Cornell University 7,120,301
University of Chicago 6,977,186
Indiana University 6,647,355
University of Washington 6,436,960
Princeton University 6,224,270
University of Minnesota 6,200,669
Ohio State University 5,674,784
University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill 5,492,451
<p>University of Wisconsin Madison, State Historical Society library on campus is a georgeous beaux arts building from 1900. Used to be the University library. The reading room was just renovated to its past glory.</p>
<p>Plus this library is the largest library devoted to N. America and adds over 2m volumes to the UW Madison library.</p>
<p>I never have figured out exactly how the WSHSL resources are counted in the UW data, if at all. A nice summary of it from an article</p>
<p>“The next day, Michael Edmonds and Harry Miller welcomed the
group to the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is impressive both as a
building and as an institution. It is the largest library for American history,
it functions as a state archive, it is the premier place to do research
on Wisconsin, and it is also known for its collection of labor and social
movement records (for example, the American Federation of Labor and
the Students for a Democratic Society). But who would have guessed that
you could also find the records of NBC and United Artists in Madison?
Paul Boyer, the retired Merle Curti Professor at the University of Wisconsin,
joined the group for lunch at the University Club. In his entertaining
talk he looked back at the “history” of his different books, his
“unsystematic” approaches, his failures and successes, and the problems
and rewards of collaboration.”
Source:
Conveners: Kathleen Conzen (University of Chicago), Andreas Etges
(Free University of Berlin), Christof Mauch (GHI). Made possible by a
grant from the ZEIT Foundation Gerd and Ebelin Bucerius.
The second annual Bucerius Seminar on American History and American
Archives took place from September 5–17, 2005. Again, the GHI, the
Department of History of the University of Chicago, and the John F.
Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University of
Berlin joined forces to organize the summer archive course. Ten doctoral
students—seven from different German universities and three from the
University of Chicago—visited American archives and libraries in Chicago,
Madison, Boston, and Washington, DC.
There were a few changes in the program from the year before, but
the idea behind the Bucerius Seminar remained the same: to prepare
Ph.D. students in American history for their prospective dissertation research
trips. They learned how to contact archives, use finding aids, and
identify important reference tools, and they became acquainted with a
dozen American research facilities. They gained insight into how historical
materials are acquired, stored, and made accessible to scholars. In
addition, the group met a number of prominent scholars who discussed
their research strategies with them.</p>
<p>The Oriental Institute’s at Chicago is oh! So beautiful. It’s not a general library (and in fact there is only one reading room, which holds less than 40 people), but it’s got this lovely honey-colored wood carved in the Gothic style with clear cathedral-shaped windows with ivy all over the outside of them… It’s one of the more picturesque places I have ever been in in my life.</p>
<p>Widener’s interior reminds me strongly of the National Gallery of Art.</p>
<p>It is…for hooked applicants. I just didn’t no who Grant Woods is because I hate art. Rest assured…I’m fairly academically qualified (you can look at past posts if you want more info…idc).</p>
Well I have not viewed all the school libraries mention above but those that I have I could point out a few that would not belong on the list. I also notice that many of the libraries listed that I have viewed ( pictures or not) all have similar styles which really begans to make the ranking look narrow, and aimed specifically towards ranking one style ( which I still would not agree with the list).</p>
<p>I love this topic!
My daughter’s on campus job is in the rare books department, Firestone Library, Princeton. She is currently in her second term at Oxford, spending much time at the Radcliffe Camera.</p>
<p>^ If your daughter likes the Firestone and Oxford, she would absolutely love the Ransom Center at UT-Austin. It’s the principal rare books and manuscripts library of UT, and is larger than Harvard’s Houghton and Yale’s Beneicke. Admittedly, it’s not pretty at all, but thats more than made up by the significance of its collections.</p>
<p>
[quote=]
The Ransom Center (at UT Austin)… easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library.
…
Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Bront</p>
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