The story
Establishment (1650–1786)
Throughout the Collegiate School's nascence in the early 18th century, books were the most valuable assets the school could acquire. Although New Haven Colony founder John Davenport began collecting books for a college library in New Haven in the 1650s, the college is said to have been founded by the gift of “forty folios” in Branford, Connecticut by its ten founding Congregational ministers. All were theological texts, and those surviving are now stored in the Beinecke Library.
In the school's first three decades, three gifts established Yale's collection. In 1714, Jeremiah Dummer, Connecticut's colonial agent in Boston, wrote to distinguished English scholars requesting gifts of books for the colony's college, then operating in Saybrook, Connecticut. Over 800 volumes arrived in Boston and were sent to the college. Among the contributors were leading scientists including Isaac Newton, John Woodward, and Edmond Halley, who sent copies of their own tracts among their donations. Religious figures, including Richard Bentley, White Kennett, and Matthew Henry, fortified the theological collections, and other books arrived from Richard Steele, Richard Blackmore, and Dummer himself, who ultimately gave the college about two hundred books.
Four years later, Elihu Yale, who had previously given some books at Dummer's behest, sent 300 books along with other goods from his estate in Wales. The school, recently moved to New Haven, took Yale's name in recognition of the bequest. A third major donation arrived fifteen years later, when philosopher-bishop George Berkeley donated his 1,000-volume, a major assembly of classical works library to the school. Now holding a sizeable collection, Yale President Thomas Clap decided to catalogue the collection for the first time, then housed in the college's only building, the College House.
This first inventory already showed evidence of book losses and thefts. During the move from Saybrook to New Haven, residents angry to lose the collection overturned the ox-carts carrying the books and liberated much of the college's collection for private use. The collection, then about 4,000 items in total, was sent inland during the Revolutionary War, a move that culled nearly a third of the collection.
19th Century growth and the first College Library (1790–1930)
The library moved often during its first 150 years while the campus’ Old Brick Row was erected. From the all-timber College House it moved to the First Chapel (Athaneum) after its construction in 1763, to the new Lyceum building in 1804, then to the new Second Chapel in 1824. The first dedicated home for the collection, the College Library, was constructed between 1842 and 1846 and held the collection for almost ninety years. The Victorian Gothic building, designed by Henry Austin and considered an extravagance in its day, was modeled after Gore Hall, the library of Harvard College. Two university-affiliated literary societies, Linonia and Brothers in Unity, were given rooms in the library for their 10,000-book collections, as was the collection of the American Oriental Society. As the collection swelled beyond the building's 50,000-book capacity, it became necessary to add annex buildings to the Library: Chittenden Hall was finished in 1890, and Linsly Hall in 1906.
Sterling Library and research collections (1920–)
As the collection surpassed one million volumes in the 20th century, it became clear that the library would need a new building. In 1917, a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, stipulating Yale build "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice," provided the means. The collection was moved to the Sterling Memorial Library in 1931, which quadrupled the library's shelving capacity and offered dedicated rooms for periodicals, reference works, and special collections.
Although it had received many important books and manuscripts pertaining to the contemporaneous development of science, the American colonies, and ecclesiastical history, it had received only piecemeal historical contributions, such as the Assyrian tablets received in 1855 that founded the Babylonian Collection. Beginning under the librarianship of Andrew Keogh in 1924, the library undertook a purposeful program of collecting rare books, personal papers, and archival works. English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker mounted a campaign among Yale alumni to purchase or donate valuable items, and early gifts included a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the papers of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and the papers of James Boswell. Having amassed a major rare books collection, the university established the Beinecke Library in 1963 as a specialized rare books storage and preservation facility, and leaving the Sterling Library's former Rare Book Room with a more modest archival collection.
The Sterling library is also home to the largest collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in the world, which it received as a gift in 1935 from William Smith Mason, of the Yale class of 1888, and is considered the largest and most valuable collection of materials ever given to the library. It is headquarters for the editorial staff who are collating and publishing The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, an ongoing effort which began in 1954 and is expected to include up to 50 volumes, containing more than 30,000 extant Franklin papers.
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More specialized facilities would follow: the Kline Science Library absorbed the library's science collections, the Mudd Library received social science books, and smaller libraries in engineering, physics, and geology were established by academic departments. By 2000, the library had expanded to more than a dozen facilities around campus, and retained over 500 staff. In 2012, many of the Science Hill libraries were re-consolidated at Kline Science Library as the Center for Science and Social Science Information. In 2020, the Center for Science and Social Science Information was then renamed as the Marx Science and Social Science Library in recognition of a permanent endowment created by the Marx family. Nancy Marx Better, who spearheaded the endowment, graduated from Yale in 1984, is the chair of the University Library Council, and received the Yale Medal in 2019. Nancy Marx Better's father, Leonard Marx Jr., and grandfather, Leonard Marx, both graduated from Yale University and then worked in real estate.
From Wikipedia’s article on Yale University Library, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3