Collections
Cornell’s Fine Arts Library began in 1871 with the generous gift of the personal collection of Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White. At the time, it was one of the largest and finest collections of architecture books in the United States. During the ensuing 135 years, the collection has grown to nearly 207,000 volumes and numerous electronic resources, while broadening its subject coverage.
The Fine Arts Library provides the Cornell community with access to materials in the areas of architecture, art, city and regional planning, landscape architecture, and photography. The library adds between 5,000-7,000 titles each year. Subscriptions are maintained to approximately 1,400 periodical titles, as well as to important periodical indexes, such as the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and the Bibliography of the History of Art. In recent years, and as technology has evolved, we have added image resources to our list of electronic offerings, providing access to the AMICO and ARTstor image repositories. Non-book holdings include: videos, DVDs, sound recordings, microforms, and computer files.
Of the Fine Arts Library’s holdings, approximately 90,000 volumes are housed at the Library Annex. Other campus libraries with related materials include Olin Library, with its large map collection and materials on planning; Mann Library, which has significant holdings on landscape architecture and textiles; and the Asia collections in Kroch Library; as well as impressive books and documents in the Rare and Manuscript Collections on Level 2B of Kroch Library.
Every day, the Fine Arts Library plays host to graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, visiting scholars and members of the broader community, resulting in more than 75,000 circulation transactions each year. In addition, expert staff help our many patrons to locate titles within our holdings and to make the best possible use of our collections. Our mission today is quite similar to that of one hundred years ago: we endeavor to enhance access to a continuously expanding collection of essential sources and learning tools.