Lamont Library, in the southeast corner of

Harvard Yard Harvard Yard is the oldest and among the most prominent parts of the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The yard has a historic center and modern crossroads and contains List of Harvard College freshman dormitories, most ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

, houses the

Harvard Library Harvard Library is the network of libraries and services at Harvard University, a private Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard Library is the oldest library system in the United States and both the largest academic librar ...

'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 Radcliffe College was a Women's colleges in the United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard Colle ...

students) were admitted beginning in 1967.

Overview

Lamont was built as part of a program to address dwindling

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space, and patron overcrowding, at

Widener Library The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5million books, is the centerpiece of the Harvard Library system. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was built by his mother Eleanor Elki ...

. 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 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