The Cornell University Library, the library system of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which is composed of 20 individual libraries, is one of the largest research libraries in the United States. Initially, a collection of 18,000 volumes stored in Morrill Hall, the library now contains over 7 million volumes, and an additional 7 million microforms. Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, donated his entire estate to the university upon his death, as did President Andrew Dickson White. Under Fiske's direction, Cornell's library introduced a number of innovations, including opening the stacks to undergraduate students, allowing undergraduates to check out books, and operating 9 hours per day from the earliest days of the library (instead of operating for only a few hours per week—as other libraries at American universities did at the time—just enough time for faculty to check out and return books), which allowed the patrons to use the facilities as a reference library.

CUL plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. The arXiv.org e-print archive, created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is operated and primarily funded by Cornell as part of CUL's services. It has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the eprint a viable and popular form for announcing new research.

The Project Euclid initiative creates one resource joining commercial journals with low-cost independent journals in mathematics and statistics. The project is aimed at enabling affordable scholarly communication through the Internet. Besides archival purposes, primary goals of the project is to facilitate journal searches and interoperatibility between different publishers.

The Cornell Library Digital Collections are online collections of historical documents. 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.

Significant collections

• Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection
• Witchcraft Collection
• Race and Religion Collection
• Fiske Icelandic Collection
• Asia collections
  • Echols Collection on Southeast Asia
  • Wason Collection on East-Asia
  • South Asia Collection
• Agriculture collections
  • The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
• Human Sexuality Collection
• Ornithology collection
• Making of America Collection
• Other digital collections

Divisions

• Adelson Library (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
• Africana Library
• Annex
• Catherwood Library (Industrial and Labor Relations Library)
• CISER (Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research)
• Engineering Library (Carpenter Hall)
• Entomology Library
• Fine Arts Library (Sibley Hall)
• Geneva Experiment Station Library
• Kroch Library (Asia Library and Rare and Manuscript Collection)
• Law Library
• Management Library (Sage Hall)
• Mann Library
• Mathematics Library (Malott Hall)
• Medical Library (Weill Cornell Medical Library)
• Music Library (Lincoln Hall)
• Nestlé Library (School of Hotel Administration Library)
• Olin & Uris Libraries
• Physical Sciences Library (Clark Hall)
• Veterinary Library (Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library)

External links

• Cornell University Library
• Special Collections
• Digital Collections

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