University of Michigan Library
USINFO | 2013-06-08 16:44

Location Ann Arbor, Michigan
Collection
Size 12.25 million volumes (University Library)
13.36 million volumes (all campus libraries)
136,810 current serials
Website lib.umich.edu

The University of Michigan Library is theuniversity library system of the University of Michigan, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States.

The University of Michigan Library ranks in the top ten largest libraries in the United States. As of 2011-12, the University Library contained more than 12.25 million volumes, while all campus library systems combined held more than 13.36 million volumes. The Library also held 136,810 currentserials, and over 4.42 million annual visits.[1]

Founded in 1838, the University Library is the university's main library and is housed in 12 buildings, with more than 20 libraries,[2] among the most significant of which are the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, Hatcher Graduate Library, Special Collections Library, and Taubman Health Sciences Library.[3] However, several U-M libraries are independent of the University Library: the Bentley Historical Library, the William L. Clements Library, theGerald R. Ford Library, the Kresge Business Administration Library of the Ross School of Business, and the Law Library of the University of Michigan Law School. The University Library is also separate from the libraries of the University of Michigan–Dearborn(Mardigian Library) and the University of Michigan–Flint (Frances Willson Thompson Library and Genesee Historical Collections Center).[3]
UM was the original home of the JSTOR database, which contains about 750,000 digitized pages from the entire pre-1990 backfile of ten journals of history and economics. In December 2004, the University of Michigan announced a book digitization program in collaboration withGoogle (known as Michigan Digitization Project), which is both revolutionary and controversial.[4] Books scanned by Google are included in HathiTrust, a digital library created by a partnership of major research institutions.

Responding to restricted public funding and the rising costs of print materials, the Library has launched significant new ventures that use digital technology to provide cost-effective and permanent alternatives to traditional print publication. This includes access to print on demand books via the Library's Espresso Book Machine.[5] The University Library is also an educational organization in its own right, offering a full range of courses, resources, support, and training for students, faculty, and researchers.

History
The Michigan Legislature creates the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1838, and that year allocated funding for a library.[6] The next year (three years before classes began), the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan acquired the University Library's first volume, John James Audubon's Birds of America, purchased at a cost of $970. (The book is now displayed in the Library Gallery's Audubon Room).[6] Also in 1838, the university's first professor, Asa Gray (known as the "father of American botany"), was entrusted with a $5,000 budget to establish the first collection of books for the University Library; he purchased 3,400 volumes.[6]

Before the university's first years, books were stored in various places around campus, including at the Law School and in various professors' homes.[6] In 1956, the North Wing of the University Building was remodeled, and books centralized in the University's Library and Museum there.[6] In 1863, the Library moved to the Law Building.[6] In 1883, the university's first library building was completed, although within twelve years of its construction the building was already too small for the growing collection.[6] Between 1870 and 1940 the collection grew rapidly, from 17,000 to 941,500.[6]

In 1890, the University Library inaugurated a handwritten card catalog system, which later changed to typed cards and, after 1900, to printed cards from the Library of Congress.[6] By 1895, the Library's overcrowding problem had become acute, and President James Burrill Angell told the Regents that "The embarrassment, to which I have called attention in previous reports, arising from the crowded condition of the Library, of course grows more serious every year."[6]

In 1900, the library established "caged areas in the stacks to protect books of exceptional value," become one of the first rare book rooms to be established in America.[6] By 1905, student borrowing privileges had become established, a shift from the early restricted-circulation model in which students needed a faculty member's permission to check books out of the Library.[6] In 1911, the Detroit anarchist Joseph Labadie donated his personal library to the university, establishing the nucleus of the what became of the Labadie Collection, the oldest collection of radical-left history materials in the world.[6]

By 1915, the overcrowded, wood-constructed General Library was designated a fire hazard by the Board of Regents.[6] After this, a new building was finally constructed. Designed by architect Albert Kahn, the library building (which is today the north building of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library) was dedicated on January 7, 1920.[6] The same year, Professor Francis W. Kelsey (who founded the university's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology) added 617ancient Egyptian papyri to the university's holdings, beginning the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection, which became the largest in the Americas.[6]

By 1940, the University Library's card catalog has 2,000 trays and 1.75 million cards.[6] A post-World War II boom in enrollment, fueled by the G.I. Bill, further strained the Library's crowding problems as the library continued to expand.[6] In 1947, the Library took over collection development responsibilities, replacing the old system in which each academic department selected and purchases books and journals.[6] In 1948, the Library established its Far Eastern Library (renamed the Asia Library in 1959) of materials fromChina, Japan, and Korea; the Asian Library is now the largest collection of East Asian resources in North America.[6]

In 1970, an eight-story addition was built, where much of the print collections are housed, along with the Library's administration offices, the Map Library, Special Collections, andPapyrology. In 1959 the Shapiro Undergraduate Library was built, with a policy of open access to the stacks for students. In years to come the principle of access to materials would become the standard and goal for all libraries and initiatives.

Collections
Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
 

 

Hatcher Graduate Library viewed from the North

The Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library is the university's the primary research collection for thehumanities and social sciences. It contains over 3.5 million volumes and over 10,000 periodicals written in more than 300 languages. Commonly cited collecting strengths of the Graduate Library include English and French history, papyrology, Germanic history and culture, classical archeology, military history, English Literature, social and political movements. In addition, these general stacks collections are supported by strong holdings in United States and foreign government documents, a significant collection of maps and cartographic materials, a comprehensive collection of publications written in East Asian languages, manuscripts and special collections, over 1.5 million items in microformat, and a strong collection of reference and bibliographic sources.[7]

A number of units are physically located in the Hatcher Library or are organizationally associated with the Hatcher Library. These include:[8]
Asia Library:

The Asia Library is located on the fourth floor of Hatcher Graduate Library (North).[9] It is one of the largest collections of East Asian materials in North America, as as of June 2012 holds some 785,000 volumes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean monographs, 2,100 currently received serials, and 80,000 titles of materials in microform, and a large number of electronic resources in all East Asian languages.[9] The Asia Library also has a reference room with essential reference materials, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps,bibliographies, and indexes, in both East Asian and Western languages.[9] The Asia Library launched its own website in April 1994, making it one of the first multilingual websites onEast Asian studies.[9]

Stephen S. Clark Library:
The Clark Library is the university's combined "map collection, government information center, and spatial and numeric data services" center.[10] Its map collection is the largest in Michigan and one of the largest of any university, consisting of more than 370,000 maps and about 10,000 atlases and reference works.[11] The map collection's holdings include a variety of cartographic materials, including maps, atlases, gazetteers, geographical dictionaries, and other reference works.[11] Among the highlights of the collection areAbrahamOrtelius's 1570 AmericaesivenoviOrbis, nova Descriptio, an early map of the Americas; GiambattistaNolli's 1798 NuovaPianta di Roma, a map of Rome; Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 1746 Plan of the Course of the Tiber, a plan of the Tiber River commissioned byPope Benedict XIV; a 1809 pocket globe, and Guillaume Coutans's 1880 Tableau Topographique des Environs de Paris.[12]

The Clark Library Government Information Collection serves as a center for governmentdocuments. The university is a Federal Depository Library for U.S. government documents, and is also the a depository for publications of the State of Michigan, government of Canada,United Nations, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and European Union. The University's collection of publications of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) are also held at the Clark Library.[13] Highlights of the Government Information Collection include a full run of all U.S. congressional publications since 1789, all UN documents since 1946, and all U.S. Census documents since 1790.[14]

The library's Spatial and Numeric Data Services (SAND) is housed at the Clark Library and on North Campus at SAND North in the Spatial Analysis Lab (room 2207) of the Art and Architecture Building. SAND assists in research, and "locates, acquires, and converts numeric and spatial data sets, especially social science data sets. SAND also supports the use of geographic information systems (GIS) software.[15]

Special Collections Library
The Special Collections Library is "home to some of the most historically significant treasures at the University of Michigan."[16] The collection is non-circulating, with many materials stored off-site and retrieved upon request.[16] The Special Collections Library includes around 275,000 published volumes, as well as an estimated 6,500 linear feet of archival material, about 450 incunabula (pre-1501 books), and almost 1,400 early manuscriptson vellum and paper.[16] The Special Collections Library also includes an estimated 20,000 posters and prints and 10,000 photographs.[17] Notable strengths of the Special Collections Library include:

• History of astronomy and mathematics - includes hundreds of pre-1800 publications, including works by Copernicus, Kepler, and Euclid.[17] The Library owns an originalGalileo manuscript, a gift of Tracy W. McGregor in 1938; the manuscript is a draft of a Galileo letter to Leonardo Donato, doge of Venice, around August 1609, mentioning his discovery of four moons of Jupiter[17][18]

• Children's literature - includes around 25,000 published volumes and a large amount of archival material "containing the artwork, correspondence, manuscripts, and other material created or collected by a number of notable authors and illustrators."[17]

• Early manuscripts - includes over 250 medieval and Renaissance volumes, as well as individual leaves, many of religious topics. Among the most notable is a collection of 20parchment leaves containing the works of Shenoute of Atripe. There is also a separate collection of around 1,250 Islamic manuscripts, written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkishand ranging from the 8th to the 20th centuries.[17] This is considered "among the largest and most important such collections in North America."[17]

• Heritage Edition of The Saint John's Bible - The Special Collections Library holds one of this rare reproductions, with calligraphy by Donald Jackson, on display on the eighth floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library.

• Joseph A. Labadie Collection - "One of the oldest and most comprehensive collections of radical history in the United States," including materials on anarchism, labor movements, civil liberties, socialism, communism, colonialism and imperialism, American labor history, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Spanish Civil War.[17]

• Worcester Philippine History Collection - This collection includes a variety of published works, manuscripts, and photographs on the history of the Philippines. The core of the collection is the extensive collection of material donated by Dean Conant Worcester to the university (his alma mater) in 1914. The collection is particularly strong in the period from 1899 and 1913, when Worcester served as a member of thePhilippine Commission and the Philippines was governed by the Bureau of Insular Affairs.[17][19]

• Transportation History Collections - This collection includes "thousands of volumes on railroad history, roads and automobile travel, bicycling, bridges, Hot air ballooning, canals, and steamships." Highlights include the records of the Lincoln Highway Association, the Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Company, and the Detroit United Railway; the papers of Charles Ellet, Jr.; a 27-volume photographic journal documenting the building of the Panama Canal; and "extensive graphic material depicting pre-20th century transportation."[17]

• Theater, Radio, Television, and Film - The Special Collections Library holds various pre-19th century plays in various languages, including "numerous works from theSpanish Golden Age; early English plays including hundreds of editions of the works ofShakespeare, beginning with his Second Folio (1632); over 1,000 plays performed in French'boulevard' theatres early in the 20th century; and several archival collections documenting American vaudeville and the 'Little Theatre' movement of the early 20th century."[17] More contemporary highlights include two collections of papers acquired from a collaborator and a partner of Orson Welles, covering Welles' career in theater, radio, and film, and an extensive archive on the life and career of film director Robert Altman.[17]

Jewish Heritage Collection
The Library's special collection on Jewish history and culture, from a gift made jointly to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the University Library.[17] Includes more than 1,500 books, 1,000 works of art (drawings, paintings, engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, andprints); 700 items of ephemera (cards, calendars, clippings, postcards, and mementoes); and some 200 objects, including both ritual objects (menorahs, groggers, yarmulkes, Challah covers, besamim) and other objects (toys, candles, serving trays).[17]

Area Programs Library

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