Exploring Libraries - Harvard University

Libraries

A library’s purpose is as varied as the collections within it. From championing curiosity to preserving history, these institutions are vital to so many communities.

Archive advocates

Members of the Harvard community are exploring the hidden past, volatile present, and equitable future of libraries.

Cathy Chukwulebe

Cathy Chukwulebe’s Little Black Library was Baker Library’s first non-business or economic collection and its first placement in an academic library.

Explore Cathy’s Little Black Library

Olha Aleksic

Bibliographer for Ukrainian Collections Olha Aleksic launched the “Russia’s War on Ukraine” digital archive last year.

Alexandra Schultz

Alexandra Schultz studied the rise of the public library, and in the process shed light on the true story of the Library of Alexandria.

Learn more about Alexandra and her research

Lesliediana Jones on Banned Books

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The right to read

What happens when we quash freedom of expression in the form of reading? Harvard Library’s Lesliediana Jones discusses the recent U.S. trend of book banning.

Advancing the mission of libraries

Libraries and archives are far from static collections—they must constantly evolve to keep up with changing times.

Students working in the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center

Expanding access

HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard are teaming up to digitize and preserve African American history collections.

Expanding access

Prized manuscript

In 1989, archivist Irina Klyagin made a remarkable discovery that changed Russian ballet scholarship.

A smiling woman leans against a tree outside

Prized manuscript

Preservation priorities

Preservation Services staff work to maintain, protect, and repair library collections.

Preservation priorities

Content accessibility

Harvard Libraries are reimagining access for their vast array of digitized articles, books, and multimedia to ensure they are accessible to users of different abilities.

A person using assistive technology on a computer

Content accessibility

Book recommendations

Looking for a good book? Explore these suggestions from members of the Harvard community.

Check out the books

Our cabinets of curiosities

Harvard’s many libraries maintain curated collections featuring everything from plants to poetry, crimes to contagions.

The newest collection explores the life of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star.

An illustrated map of cape cod — Maps

Get lost in the fanciful delights of 20th-century pictorial cartography at the Harvard Map Collection.

Explore the pictorial maps collection

A woman editing film — Movies

Explore the work of Helen Hill, an experimental animator, filmmaker, writer, and social activist. Her films feature puppets, hand-drawn animation, found footage, and hand-processing techniques.

Explore the Helen Hill collection

An old magazine cover that says — History

"Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom" is a growing digital collection highlighting materials related to Black history and culture, providing freely accessible digitized primary sources for scholars.

Learn more about the collection

A record with a label explaining it is a poetry recording — Poetry

The Woodberry Poetry Room has one of the largest collections of literary recordings in the U.S., featuring more than 6,000 recordings of poets and writers from the 1930s to the present day.

Explore the poetry recordings

A man holding a photograph of himself — Photography

"At the Intersection of Science and Art" draws from the wealth of material in the Polaroid corporate archives at Baker Library, highlighting the formative years and trajectory of the Polaroid Corporation.

Learn more about Polaroid's history

A black and white photo of people in 1911 in masks and protective gear — Disease

This online collection offers important historical perspectives on the science and public policy of epidemiology today and contributes to the understanding of the global, social–history, and public–policy implications of diseases.

Explore the history of diseases and epidemics

A book cover that says — Music

"Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans" is a digital exhibit exploring the extraordinary scholar whose landmark book inspired the academic subfield of Black music studies.

Learn more about Eileen Southern's work

Stars graphed on a white paper — Stars

"The Harvard College Observatory's Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection" contains more than 550,000 glass plate negatives and spectral images from more than a century of irreplaceable scientific observations. Hundreds of women studied and curated the Harvard Plate Stacks, but more often than not their work went unrecognized. The Center for Astrophysics is dedicated to understanding and undoing the erasure of these women’s contributions while advancing and enabling the creation of new knowledge.

Sail through the stars

A sketch of a lobelia plant — Plants

The archival collections of the Botany Libraries are rich in original artwork that represents the scientific work of Harvard botanists, including illustrations by Jacob Bigelow and watercolors by Charles E. Faxon.

Explore the botanical illustrations

An old sketch of a man throwing something at a woman — Crime

"The Studies in Scarlet" collection held by the Harvard Law School Library, includes American, British, and Irish cases from 1815 to 1914 involving domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, child custody, and murder.

Learn more about the Law School collection

The future of libraries

Through progress, libraries have an opportunity to reach more people and tell more inclusive stories.

Explore all that the Library Innovation Lab does

Why libraries matter more than ever in an age of Google

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An accessible future

Harvard staff, faculty, and alumni are reimagining what libraries can look like, how libraries can merge physical and digital assets, how online lending can best serve everyone, and many more considerations for the future of these community cornerstones.

Design Now Podcast, Episode 5: The future of library design

In this episode of the Graduate School of Design podcast, experts discuss designing libraries for a world in which books are often accessed remotely and knowledge sought via search engines rather than librarians.

Learn more and read the transcript

An equitable future

Harvard experts are promoting equity in libraries by expanding access to the world of art, democratizing knowledge, creating open and collaborative archives of modern history, and constantly examining the past.