The Niels Bohr Library & Archives and the Center for History of Physics constitute the History Programs of the American Institute of Physics. Our mission is to preserve and make known the history of modern physics and allied sciences. Our in-house resources include a primary print collection of monographs, text books, instrument catalogs, and other publications; the archives of the American Institute of Physics and its Member Societies; select manuscript collections; and large photograph and oral history collections.
The American Philosophical Society Library is a major national center for research in the history of the sciences, medicine, and technology. With its roots extending back to the founding of the Society in 1743, the Library houses over 350,000 volumes and bound periodicals, eleven million manuscripts, 250,000 images, and thousands of hours of audio tape. The Library's manuscript collections include a vast range of materials covering such topics as 18th-century natural history, American Indian linguistics and culture, nuclear physics, computer development, and medical science. The Library is among the premier institutions in the nation for documenting the history of genetics and eugenics, the study of natural history in the 18th and 19th centuries, quantum mechanics, and the development of cultural anthropology in America.
Encompassing books, manuscripts, objects, and instruments dating from the late 15th to the 21st century, Brown’s collections on the history of science, medicine, and technology are uniquely diverse in both scope and size. Thematic focuses range from the historical, material, and intellectual evolution of science, technology, and medicine across the globe to more contemporary areas of scholarly inquiry, such as disability studies, environmental justice, and critical theories of knowledge-production.
The California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections, founded in 1968, has a mission of facilitating understanding of Caltech’s role in the history of science and technology. Our collections include the papers of Caltech researchers; photographs, film, audio, video, websites, and publications documenting Caltech’s history; scientific instruments characteristic of research at Caltech; and rare books anchored by the Rocco Collection of early modern physics and astronomy. We have been collecting oral histories of Caltech faculty and other affiliates since 1979, and have made approximately 200 transcripts available on the web.
Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is home to notable collections in the history of science and technology; mechanical, symbolic, and digital computing; cryptology; robotics; and botanical literature and art. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ holdings comprise approximately 35,000 rare books; more than 50 mechanical computational devices and cryptographic machines; early AI art; papers and archival collections of Carnegie Mellon faculty, researchers and alumni; and one of the foremost collections of rare books and art on plant science and historical botany.
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives was created in 1972 and houses a rich repository of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and scientific reprints documenting genetic research, and the work of the Laboratory faculty, since 1890. The Archives makes its collection available to scholars, graduate students and writers interested in the history of molecular biology and genetics. The Archives' mission is to gather and preserve information and materials related to the history of molecular biology and genetics and the development of the Laboratory, and to make this documentation available worldwide.
The College of Physicians Historical Medical Library is one of the world's premier research collections in the history of medicine. The unique holdings of the library include 411 incunables (books printed before 1500), an extensive collection of manuscripts and archives, and a comprehensive collection of 19th- and early 20th-century medical journals. The College also holds more than one million manuscript items and twenty-five thousand objects.
The range of collections in Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (RBML) span more than 4,000 years and comprise rare printed works, cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets, papyri, and Coptic ostraca; medieval and renaissance manuscripts; as well as art and realia. Some 500,000 printed books and 14 miles of manuscripts, personal papers, and records form the core of the RBML holdings. One can find literary manuscripts from the 14th century to the papers of authors Herman Wouk and Erica Jong. Archives as varied as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Random House, NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International-USA, and the archives of Columbia University are available for research.
Drexel University is a leading institution of higher education in the city of Philadelphia with a legacy of advancing technologies, industry, and the arts for the betterment of society. Its medical school’s heritage of innovation and inclusion includes the first degree-granting medical school for women in the world. An affiliation with the Academy of Natural Sciences expands the scope of Drexel research, education and civic engagement into the natural and environmental sciences.
For more than 100 hundred years, scholars have used David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library to write new histories, explore significant lives, study ecological change, trace the evolution of texts, understand cultural shifts and create new art and literature. Over time, both our holdings and our vision have grown — expanding from an early emphasis on regional history to a global perspective and complementing a focus on traditional academic disciplines with the transformative possibilities of interdisciplinarity. Today the Rubenstein Library holds more than 350,000 rare books and 10,000 manuscript collections. These materials introduce new perspectives, challenge preconceptions and provide a tangible connection to our shared past.
The Harvard Library—the largest academic library in the world—includes 20.4 million volumes, 180,000 serial titles, an estimated 400 million manuscript items, 10 million photographs, 124 million archived web pages, and 5.4 terabytes of born-digital archives and manuscripts. Access to this rich collection is provided by nearly 800 library staff members who operate more than 70 separate library units.
The History of Science Society is the world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in historical context. Over 3,000 individual and institutional members across the world support the Society’s mission to foster interest in the history of science and its social and cultural relations.
The Huntington Library is one of the world's great independent research libraries, with more than nine million items spanning the 11th to 21st centuries. The Huntington's history of science collection is one of the largest and most important in North America. Its diverse materials document western practice and theory in science, medicine, technology, and a variety of subdisciplines. Holdings range widely, from a 13th-century Ptolemy Almagest manuscript and landmark printed books in the world-renowned Burndy Library to modern civil engineering reports and aerospace archives.
The Historical Collection of the Institute of the History of Medicine ranks among the best such collections housed in American medical schools. The collection contains over seventy-eight thousand volumes, including runs of more than eight hundred journals. It has one of the most comprehensive collections of secondary literature in the history of medicine, and subscribes to almost all currently published periodicals in history of medicine, history of science and social studies of medicine. A notable number of landmark works of medical history are held in the rare book collection of some twenty-five thousand volumes, which is also especially strong in the history of infectious disease and public health.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Its collections consist of more than 171 million items, including more than 40 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 74 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.
Since its founding in 1946, the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, has emerged as one of the foremost independent science and technology libraries in the country. Its extensive primary- and secondary-source holdings document the sciences, technology, and engineering disciplines from the 15th century to the present. The collections are especially strong in natural history, astronomy, engineering, physical sciences, life sciences, environmental studies, non-western sciences, Cold War sciences, earth sciences, infrastructure studies, aeronautics, and mathematics.
MIT’s Department of Distinctive Collections is home to thousands of rare books and manuscripts with an expansive range, including manuscript collections from notable MIT faculty and administrators. Many texts represent foundational and fundamental scientific discovery and achievement. Works by prominent figures such as Georgius Agricola, Robert Boyle, Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, Otto von Guericke, Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Issac Newton, Mary Somerville, Alessandro Volta are included, as are less universally recognizable scientists.
McGill University is home to world-class collections relating to the history of science, technology, and medicine: the Blacker Wood natural history collection within Rare Books and Special Collections, the Osler Library for the History of Medicine, the Maude Abbott Medical Museum, and the Rutherford Museum, which specializes in the history of physics.
The world’s largest biomedical library, the National Library of Medicine maintains and makes available a vast print collection and produces electronic information resources on a wide range of topics that are searched billions of times each year by millions of people around the globe. It also supports and conducts research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. In addition, the Library coordinates an 8,000+ member Network of the National Library of Medicine that promotes and provides access to health information in communities across the United States.
Among the most significant collections of medical history in the United States, NYAM’s collections include over 550,000 volumes, including approximately 32,000 volumes of rare books; 275,000 portraits and illustrations; over 1450 linear feet of manuscript material; and 400,000 pamphlets. Together, these materials are an extraordinary resource, providing insights into the formative texts and medical thinking in which contemporary practice is rooted, and demonstrate our attempts to understand our bodies, minds, and health across time and culture.
The Newberry Library's evolving collections today include more than 1.6 million books, five million manuscript pages (15,000 cubic feet), and 600,000 historic maps. Special areas of strength include cartography, printing history and book arts, renaissance studies, Native American studies, history of religion and music, genealogy and local history, Chicago and the Midwest.
Princeton University has many libraries and hundreds of collections. The main library is Firestone, which has more than 6 million printed volumes, 50,000 feet of manuscripts, 3 million microforms, and thousands of online journals and research tools. Specialty libraries include Biology, Engineering, Astrophysics, Chemistry, the Furth Plasma Physics Library, Mathematics and Physics, the Geosciences and Map Library, and the Historic Maps Collection. The Manuscripts Division holds an estimated 8,500 linear feet of materials covering five thousand years of recorded history and all parts of the world, with special strength in Western Europe, the Near East, the United States, and Latin America.
The Center's collections contain over 117 million pages of documents and 45 terabytes of data in digital repository, including over 900,000 photographs, 18,000 reels of microfilm, 6,000 films, and 6,000 maps and architectural drawing. Since its inception in 1974, nearly 7,500 scholars have visited the Center to conduct research for books, articles, dissertations, and films in a wide variety of fields.
The Science History Institute (formerly the Chemical Heritage Foundation) is a library, museum, and center for scholars. The Institute maintains collections, including instruments and apparatus, rare books, fine art, and the personal papers of prominent scientists, corporations, and institutions, all related to chemistry, chemical engineering, the modern life sciences, and related sciences, technologies, and industries. Holdings include books and journals dating to the 15th century, over 6,000 rare books, over 6,000 linear feet of manuscripts, more than 1,100 oral history interviews with leading scientists, historical photographs, artifacts, and works of art.
Situated at the center of the world's largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Libraries forms a vital part of the research, exhibition, and educational enterprise of the Institution. The Libraries unites 20 libraries into one system supported by central collections support services. Holdings include two million printed books, journals, and manuscripts and a Special Collections Department with 50,000 rare and valuable volumes and 2,000 manuscript groups dating from the thirteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Since its founding in 1841, the US Naval Observatory has amassed culturally and scientifically significant materials relevant to the study of the intellectual, social and cultural history of the United States and beyond. As one of the most complete astronomical collections in the country, the USNO Library has important resources for the investigation into the history of science and technology. These resources can and should facilitate investigations into the dramatic changes in the fields of astronomy and physics, particularly in the 19th and 20th century.
The UCSF Library is one of the preeminent health sciences libraries in the world, containing an expansive collection of the world’s health sciences knowledge base including over 600 reference databases, more than 96,000 journal and serial titles, and 1.2 million print and electronic books. The mission of the UCSF Library’s Archives and Special Collections is to identify, collect, organize, interpret, and maintain rare and unique material to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve institutional memory.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a long history of stewarding archives and records that document the history of its land-grant mission and scientific and technological innovations as well as material culture, manuscripts, and rare books that engage the public in our collective cultural and scientific heritage. These materials are held by several cultural heritage institutions at UIUC—the University of Illinois Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, and Spurlock Museum of World Cultures—which strive to promote their holdings to a broad array of researchers interested in the history of science and technology.
The University of Kansas's history of science collections excel in ornithology, botany and taxonomy. The Kenneth Spencer Research Library's holdings include a natural history collection of 15,000 bound volumes, 8,000 volumes on early American science, and 2,000 volumes related to the work of Carolus Linnaeus. The Clendening Library at University of Kansas Medical Center holds 45,000 volumes pertaining to the history of medicine and its allied sciences. The Library's rare books holdings document the history of medicine, mainly in Western Europe and Britain, from the 15th century to the present.
The University of Maryland-College Park holds collections related to agricultural science, environmental science, and the physical sciences. The University Archives contain material related to the history of the University of Maryland, including the personal and research records of prominent Maryland scientists. The State of Maryland Collection includes significant holdings on the environmental history of Maryland.
The History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma, founded in 1949 with an initial gift from Everette Lee DeGolyer, is a premier research collection. Its holdings include nearly 100,000 print volumes across diverse disciplinary subject areas, along with current publications in the field. The Collections supports multidisciplinary research in every chronological period, geographic region, and subject area of science, technology, and medicine. Among the oldest items are a cuneiform brick (ca. 1300 BCE), a small number of medieval and early modern manuscripts, and the Collections' oldest printed book: Hrabanus Maurus, Opus de universo (1467). Astronomy, physics, natural history, geology, technology, and science and religion are traditional areas of strength for the print holdings.
The University of Pennsylvania library system includes holdings in many areas, with 5.6 million printed volumes and archival collections spread among the main library and satellite subject libraries in biomedicine, chemistry, veterinary medicine, engineering, and math / physics / astronomy. Manuscript collections include the Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection devoted to the history of chemistry, comprising early and modern works on chemistry, alchemy, early medicine and pharmacology, dyeing, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics; biographies of chemists; works on the chemical industry; and the history of chemical education.
The department of Archives & Special Collections in the University of Pittsburgh Library System collects, describes, and preserves a global collection of rare books and archival materials. Our archival collections are strong in medicine; literary and performing arts, with an emphasis on Black artists; horror; labor unions; local history; science; philosophy; and music. Our rare books represent 19th c. children’s literature, early-modern natural philosophy, science fiction, and horror.
With almost 4 million titles – both digital and physical – University of Sydney is the largest academic library collection in the southern hemisphere. We provide a rich and diverse collection of resources, including rare books and electronic publications and databases to further the teaching and research programs of the University.
The collections of the Thomas Fisher Library are many and varied, reflecting the wide diversity of research conducted at the University of Toronto by its own faculty and students, visiting scholars, and the general public. Chronologically, the range is from a 1789 B.C.E. Babylonian cuneiform tablet from Ur, to original drafts and printed works of contemporary Canadian writers. The great strengths of the Library lie in the fields of the history of science and medicine, British, European, and Canadian literature, philosophy, theology, political science, Hebraica and Judaica, and the art history of the book.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Library's rare books and special collections include primary and secondary resources in history of science, medicine, technology, and pharmacy, with strengths in physical and life sciences, illustrated natural history, alchemy and chemistry, science and religion, optics and ophthalmology, health sciences, herbal therapeutics, illustrated anatomy, pharmacy, and technology, including archival collections and collections of printed ephemera.
The Wagner Institute has an extensive library of primarily scientific works collected by the founder and over the course of its history. Dating from the late 17th to the early 20th century, the collection covers the natural and physical sciences, education, medicine, archaeology and anthropology, the pseudo-sciences, instrument building, and engineering. The Library contains monographs, serials, archives, manuscripts, maps, prints, photographs, drawings, and glass lantern slides. The collection reflects the Institute’s curriculum as well as the research interests of its faculty, fellows, and museum staff. The Library is especially rich in early 19th century English and American works devoted to the history and teaching of science and technology.
Wellcome Collection offers the most extensive specialist resource for the history of Western medicine in Britain. Archive holdings currently comprise over 800 archive collections of personal papers of significant figures, such as Edward Jenner, Florence Nightingale, Marie Stopes, Francis Crick and John Sulston, and organisational archives from the United Kingdom and Europe (collecting continues). We also hold records of health-related charities, campaigning organisations and pressure groups, as well as the records of professional bodies, businesses and research institutions.
The Yale University Library is one of the world’s leading research libraries and a highly valued partner in the teaching and research mission of Yale University and scholarly communities worldwide. It is committed to fostering intellectual growth by collecting, organizing, preserving, and providing access to a rich and unique record of human thought and creativity. One of the Library’s distinctive strengths is its rich spectrum of resources, which include more than 15 million volumes and information in all media, ranging from ancient papyri to early printed books to electronic databases. Housed in 15 libraries, including Sterling Memorial Library, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library and the new Center for Science and Social Science Information.
