Description of the Historical Studies-Social Science Library

The Historical Studies-Social Science Library [Marcia Tucker, Librarian] contains about 100,000 volumes and has subscriptions to about 1,200 journals. The library is strongest in classical studies, ancient history and archaeology, but it contains basic document collections, reference works and important secondary works of scholarship in most fields of history and the social sciences. The journal collection is extensive, and fairly complete back runs exist to the founding of the Institute. The library has occupied its present building since late 1964. (The building was officially dedicated on April 24, 1965.)

The Institute's rare book collection, the gift of Lessing J. Rosenwald, consists of about 2,000 volumes on the history of science and was compiled by Herbert M. Evans in the 1930's. The collection, which is housed in a special room, includes numerous first editions of important scientific works in mathematics, astronomy, physics and the life sciences.

The library has an extensive offprint collection that includes offprints received by Professors Andrew E. Z. Alföldi, Kurt Gödel, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Elias Avery Lowe, Millard Meiss, Erwin Panfosky, and former members Robert Huygens and Walther Kirchner.

The microfilm collections of the library include a large selection from Manuscripta, a collection of several thousand fifteenth- to nineteenth-century printed books from the Vatican Library. The Bavarian Academy has given the Institute a microfilm copy of slips presented for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae as well as later updates recorded on compact disk.. The library has microfilm copies of the papers of Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and Simone Weil.

The Historical Studies-Social Science Library houses the Institute archives. The papers in the collection date from the 1930's and include official correspondence of the Director's Office, minutes of meetings of the Faculty and the Board of Trustees, miscellaneous correspondence concerning past Faculty members, records of the Electronic Computer Project and other documents. The archives also include the Institute's extensive photograph collection.

Both of the Institute's libraries participate in the shared cataloguing system of the Research Libraries Group, which gives Institute scholars computerized access to a database that contains more than twenty-two million records. Searches of this database retrieve bibliographic information and identify the location of materials in all participating libraries.

The Historical Studies-Social Science Library maintains a computer center with access to a variety of word processing packages for both PCs and Macintoshes, Islamic and French studies, and connection software to the Internet for additional information resources. The Mathematics-Natural Sciences Library has access to the Math-Sci Online database.

All scholars affiliated with the Institute enjoy the same privileges as Princeton University faculty in the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library and also in the Robert E. Speer Library of the Princeton Theological Seminary.

The librarians and the Faculties of all four Schools at the Institute warmly appreciate gifts of books and articles from former and current Members of the Institute.