COVER STORY
The library that never sleeps: 24/7 access, on campus and around the world
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The library's Rare and Manuscript Collections includes this early 20th-century photo of Professor James Needham teaching the first limnology course in the United States. See larger image
"Higher education is more and more collaborative and less and less location-based," Li says. "We cannot just be local anymore, because our students and faculty could be in China or Qatar or Africa."
The library collaborates with faculty, too, working to help with their research and make it accessible to new and different audiences.
One local example is the "Chats in the Stacks" series, initiated more than a decade ago, which invites Cornell-based authors to give brief talks at libraries on campus.
Sera Young, a nutritional scientist at Cornell, recently gave a "Chats" talk on her latest book, "Craving Earth: Understanding Pica, the Urge to Eat Clay, Starch, Ice and Chalk." "My topic is really arcane and esoteric in some ways, but when you talk about pregnancy cravings, people can really relate to it," Young says. "'Chats in the Stacks' was a way for me to reach across all those boundaries and silos academia can set up. … The interdisciplinarity of Cornell blows me away, and the library is emblematic of just how connected this university is."
Anne Kenney puts it another way: "The library does so many different things, but each one of them is connected to a single goal: enhancing the life of the mind."
Keep in touch and be in the know
A Cornell degree has many benefits; one of them is continued access to valuable online Cornell University Library resources, including the recently added JSTOR, a popular database of scholarly journals. Alumni can also benefit from the expertise of Cornell librarians by asking them at alumni.library.cornell.edu.
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