Monday, October 17, 2011

Largest College Libraries.

  1. Harvard University: 15,826,570 (Cambridge, MA)
  2. Yale University: 12,368,757 (New Haven, CT)
  3. University of Toronto: 10,536,868 (Toronto, ON)
  4. University of Illinois -- Urbana-Champaign: 10,524,935 (Champaign, IL)
  5. University of California -- Berkeley: 10,094,417 (Berkeley, CA)
  6. Columbia University: 9,455,312 (New York, NY)
  7. University of Texas -- Austin: 9,022,363 (Austin, TX)
  8. University of Michigan -- Ann Arbor: 8,273,050 (Ann Arbor, MI)
  9. University of California -- Los Angeles: 8,157,182 (Los Angeles, CA)
  10. University of Wisconsin -- Madison: 8,015,081 (Madison, WI)



6 comments:

  1. AnonymousOctober 17, 2011 at 3:12 PM

    Is this list showing the number of sandwiches eaten, comfy couches available or MB of streaming video watched? Whatever the metric, libraries won't fulfill their potential until they dump all those things filled with words sitting on the shelves. They are a health hazard because they can attract mold.

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  2. College MiseryOctober 17, 2011 at 4:13 PM

    From the linked website:

    These are the Paul Bunyons [sic] of college libraries. Make sure you leave breadcrumbs when you go looking for a book. Colleges are listed in order of the number of volumes in the university library.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great Lakes GretaOctober 17, 2011 at 9:40 PM

    Nothing like attempting to scare students away from the stacks.

    Too many books! Too many books! Run away!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Contingent CassandraOctober 18, 2011 at 12:44 PM

    I'm not generally one to believe that bigger is better, but, since I fell in love with doing original scholarship in the stacks of one of those libraries (full of nice, dusty and probably also moldy volumes, some of those bound and placed on the shelves in the 19th century), using some pretty obscure materials, I'm not in a position to criticize this kind of list, either. I now work at a fairly young university that belongs to a very good regional library consortium, and feel that the library resources I have are just as good as those I had at my more-venerable undergrad and grad institutions. Also, much as I love old volumes, I also very much appreciate being able to access well-produced digitized versions that offer both an image of the original document and searchable text. I don't want to see the originals go away, but at this point I'd hate to lose the digital option.

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  5. Frog and ToadOctober 18, 2011 at 5:31 PM

    The UC system, anyway, is slashing and burning its library budget, so no worries about too many damned books. But no espresso bar, either.

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  6. Prof PoopieheadOctober 18, 2011 at 11:47 PM

    I used to descend deep into the stacks for a quiet study spot during exams - there were enough sub levels such that you'd remain unscathed after a nuclear apocalypse or a Night of the Comet. While weaving through a maze of stacks to get to a study carrel in an isolated corner, I'd occasionally get distracted by interesting old tomes along the shelves, and so I'd stop and leaf through books completely irrelevant to the studying I needed to do. Loved it.

    ReplyDelete

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