Lamont Library, in the southeast corner of
Harvard Yard
Harvard Yard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the oldest part of the Harvard University campus, its historic center and modern crossroads. It contains most of the freshman dormitories, Harvard's most important libraries, Memorial Church, sever ...
in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
, houses the
Harvard Library's primary undergraduate collection in humanities and social sciences. It was the first library in the United States specifically planned to serve undergraduates. Women (that is,
Radcliffe College students) were admitted beginning in 1967.
Overview
Lamont was built as part of a program to address dwindling
stack space, and patron overcrowding, at
Widener Library
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5million books in its "vast and cavernous" stacks, is the centerpiece of the Harvard College Libraries (the libraries of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and, more broadly, of the ...
.
Keyes D. Metcalf, Librarian of Harvard College and Director of the Harvard University Library from 1937 to 1955, planned the building with Boston architect Henry R. Shepley.
Opened in 1949, it is named for its principal donor, Harvard alumnus
Thomas W. Lamont.
Lamont's general collection of 200,000 volumes began with transfers from Widener, the
Boylston Hall reserve-book collections, and the
Harvard Union
Harvard Union, now known as the Barker Center and once known as the Freshman Union, is a historic building on Quincy and Harvard Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
History
The union was designed McKim, Mead & White and built in 1900; it was th ...
Reading Room. A modified
Dewey classification scheme was used, and the main spaces included capacious open-shelf alcoves for browsing, study, and research. The
Library of Congress Classification system was adopted in the 1970s.
After
Littauer Library closed in 2007, Lamont became the home library for HCL's former Social Sciences Program. Four units of the Social Sciences ProgramDocuments Services, Microform Services, Numeric Data Services, and Environmental Information Serviceswere combined with Lamont Reference Services. Lamont houses the College Library's major research collections in government documents and microform collections across all disciplines.
References
External links
Lamont Library
{{Authority control
Library buildings completed in 1949
University and college academic libraries in the United States
Harvard University buildings
Libraries in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Lamont family
Harvard Library