University of Michigan Library
The University of Michigan Library is the academic library system of the University of Michigan. The university's 38 constituent and affiliated libraries together make it the second largest research library by number of volumes in the United States.
As of 2019–20, the University Library contained more than 14,543,814 volumes, while all campus library systems combined held more than 16,025,996 volumes. As of the 2019–2020 fiscal year, the Library also held 221,979 serials, and over 4,239,355 annual visits.
Founded in 1838, the University Library is the university's main library and is housed in 12 buildings with more than 20 libraries, among the most significant of which are the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, Hatcher Graduate Library, Special Collections Library, and Taubman Health Sciences Library. However, several U-M libraries are independent of the University Library: the Bentley Historical Library, the William L. Clements Library, the Gerald 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 and of the University of Michigan–Flint.
The University of Michigan 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 with Google, which is both revolutionary and controversial. Books scanned by Google are included in HathiTrust, a digital library created by a partnership of major research institutions. As of March 2014, the following collections had been digitized: Art, Architecture and Engineering Library; Bentley Historical Library; Buhr Building ; Dentistry Library ; Fine Arts Library ; Hatcher Graduate Library ; Herbarium Library; Kresge Business Administration Library; Law Library ; Museums Library; Music Library ; Shapiro Undergraduate Library ; Special Collections Research Library ; Taubman Health Sciences Library ;
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. 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.
The University Librarian and Dean of Libraries is Lisa R. Carter, whose term began on May 1, 2023.
History
The Michigan Legislature created the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1838, and that year allocated funding for a library. The next year, 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.. Also in 1838, the university's first professor, Asa Gray, was entrusted with a $5,000 budget to establish the first collection of books for the University Library; he purchased 3,400 volumes.Before the university's first years, books were stored in various places around campus, including at the Law School and in various professors' homes. In 1856, the North Wing of the University Building was remodeled, and books centralized in the university's Library and Museum there. In 1863, the Library moved to the Law Building. In 1883, with Raymond Cazallis Davis as a motivating force in its completion, the university's first library building was finished. Within twelve years of its construction the building was already too small for the growing collection. Between 1870 and 1940 the collection grew rapidly, from 17,000 to 941,500.
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. 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."
In 1900, the library established "caged areas in the stacks to protect books of exceptional value," becoming one of the first rare book rooms to be established in America. 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. In 1911, the Detroit anarchist Joseph Labadie donated his personal library to the university, establishing the nucleus of what became of the Labadie Collection, the oldest collection of radical-left history materials in the world.
By 1915, the overcrowded, wood-constructed General Library was designated a fire hazard by the Board of Regents. After this, a new building was finally constructed. Designed by architect Albert Kahn, the library building was dedicated on January 7, 1920. The same year, Professor Francis W. Kelsey added 617 ancient Egyptian papyri to the university's holdings, beginning the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection, which became the largest in the Americas.
By 1940, the University Library's card catalog had 2,000 trays and 1.75 million cards. 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. In 1947, the library took over collection development responsibilities, replacing the old system in which each academic department selected and purchases books and journals. In 1948, the library established its Far Eastern Library of materials from China, Japan, and Korea; the Asian Library is now the largest collection of East Asian resources in North America.
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, and Papyrology. The Undergraduate Library was built in 1958, and renamed for Harold T. and Vivian B. Shapiro in 1995, with extensive access 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
The Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library is the university's primary research collection for the humanities 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. The library was named after Harlan Hatcher, the eighth President of the University.A number of units are physically in the Hatcher Library or are organizationally associated with the Hatcher Library. These include:
Asia Library
The Asia Library is located on the fourth floor of Hatcher Graduate Library. It is one of the largest collections of East Asian materials in North America, 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. 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. The Asia Library launched its own website in April 1994, making it one of the first multilingual websites on East Asian studies.Stephen S. Clark Library
The Clark Library is the university's combined "map collection, government information center, and spatial and numeric data services" center. 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. The map collection's holdings include a variety of cartographic materials, including maps, atlases, gazetteers, geographical dictionaries, and other reference works. Among the highlights of the collection are Abraham Ortelius's 1570 Americae sive novi Orbis, nova Descriptio, an early map of the Americas; Giambattista Nolli's 1798 Nuova Pianta 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 by Pope Benedict XIV; an 1809 pocket globe, and Guillaume Coutans's 1880 Tableau Topographique des Environs de Paris.The Clark Library Government Information Collection serves as a center for government documents. 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, and European Union. The university's collection of publications of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization are also held at the Clark Library. 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.
The library's Spatial and Numeric Data Services is housed at the Clark Library and on North Campus at SAND North in the Spatial Analysis Lab 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 software.