Campus Libraries

When the University opened its doors to students in 1868, the library contained about 18,000 volumes, temporarily housed in two rooms of Morrill Hall. Morrill was the only building on the Quadrangle that had a roof on it at the time.

New library quarters on the ground floor of the new McGraw Hall were occupied in the fall of 1872. By that time, the collection had grown to 30,000 volumes.

During the 1870s, the library grew steadily. In the 1880s, as the book collections continued to expand, a plan was put forward for the construction of an appropriate building to house the collections.

The old university library building, the gift of Henry W. Sage, was dedicated in October 1891. Designed by William H. Miller of Ithaca (class of 1872), it was fashioned to accommodate 450,000 volumes. The University confidently expected that this capacity--four times what was actually needed for the collection at hand in 1891--would provide generously for expansion in the future. But both Cornell and its library developed in swift, sure strides that exceeded all expectations. By 1910, the librarian predicted that unless more stack space was found, it would be necessary to put part of Cornell's burgeoning collections in boxes.

By 1955, the old library housed more than twice the number of volumes than it was built to accommodate. Not only that, an additional 300,000 books were in storage. The library had passed the one-million mark in 1938 after just 70 years of operation. The two-millionth book was added in December 1958. By the summer of 1962, the total holdings of the library had reached 2,278,046 volumes, making it the seventh largest university library in the country.

The John M.Olin Library

The completion of the John M. Olin research library in 1961 gave Cornell--for the first time in fifty years--a building large enough to house its principal collections and modern enough to accommodate the needs of faculty, students, and staff. The fully air-conditioned building provided space for more than two million volumes and made it possible to bring together books stored in a number of locations on campus. Olin Library also afforded, again for the first time at Cornell, space for a properly equipped Rare Book Room and larger special collections (moved to the Carl A. Kroch Library in 1992).

The primary purpose of Olin Library was to provide reading, research and other work space for students and faculty. For this purpose the Olin Library provided 350 carrels for graduate students and 100 faculty studies located in the stack areas, where researchers would be near the books they needed for their work. There were also graduate study rooms, conference rooms, and other special work rooms, a general reading room, a microtext room, and a periodicals section for the 20,000 periodicals to which Cornell then subscribed (since grown to more than 60,000).

In 1961, Olin Library showed the care taken by its architects to consider the practical needs of all those who used the building in its smallest details. The first floor represented a radical departure from traditional design. Instead of an imposing stairway or other architectural decoration, the entrance to the building had glass doors, a minimum grade, and a sweeping view of the lighted interior. Just inside the entrance were reading rooms, the reference and circulation desks, and the periodicals section, as well as a sunlit sculpture court. (The Central Libraries, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, [1961])

In 2002, the renovation of the first floor updates the function and comfort of Olin Library for the 21st century.

Feedback Maureen Morris, Virginia Cole Olin Library, Reference Services Division Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853