Robarts Library
| Robarts Library | |
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 View of the Robarts Library
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| founding | 1973 |
| Duration | 4.8 million |
| Library type | Study library |
| place | Toronto |
| ISIL | OCLC-UTO |
The Robarts Library (officially: John P. Robarts Research Library ) is a library opened in 1973 in Toronto, Canada . She is on the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences specialized and part of the University of Toronto owned network University of Toronto Libraries . Named after former Ontario Prime Minister John Robarts , the library has more than 4.8 million books, 4.1 million microfilms and 740,000 other media. Library construction is assigned to the Brutalist architectural style and is one of its most important examples in North America.
location
The Robarts Library is located in the northwest of the 71 acre campus of the University of Toronto, about 2 kilometers north of the Financial District . It is west of Massey College and Back Campus and south of the Bata Shoe Museum . The library complex is located on an almost rectangular, tree-lined property that is bordered on all four sides by streets.
description
Existence and use
The library was originally intended to be available only to postgraduates . However, following protests by undergraduate students, it was made available to all students. There were plans to set up a special book transport system that would have enabled library staff to direct books to the lending desk. After the library was opened to all students, they were forced to forego the establishment of this system. The partially completed tracks for the conveyor belts can still be seen today above the bookshelves.
The Robarts Library houses the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library on the eighth floor , which holds over 400,000 media in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The holdings of the Asian library go back to 1933; its holdings were originally recorded in Beijing and only came to Toronto in June 1935. The Dictionary of Old English project , which defines the vocabulary for the first six centuries, is also located in the library . It complements the standard works Middle English Dictionary , which covers the range from 1100 to 1500, and the Oxford English Dictionary . All three works fully describe the vocabulary of the English language . On the first floor, the Robarts Library houses a map collection with a total of over 125,000 maps and 67,000 aerial photos .
In addition to a rich collection, the library offers a reading room that is open 24 hours a day during the lecture period . A special computer room on the first floor offers students not only internet access but also the possibility of accessing printers, scanners and other audiovisual equipment. The center for text digitization is located on the seventh floor and processes the university's contributions for the online archive; it is also affiliated with the Internet Archive project .
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library , which is the largest collection of publicly accessible rare books and manuscripts, is located in part of the three-part library building . The collection includes the Schedelsche Weltchronik from 1493, Shakespeare's Folio from 1623, Newton's Principia Mathematica from 1687 and 36 ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts that have been preserved in fragments . Since 1997, the Rare Book Library has housed a collection of private records, photographs and manuscripts by the writer Lewis Carroll .
Description of the building and architecture
The Robarts Library building is divided into three units. From the middle of the south and north facing side there are two extensions each, where the Rare Book Library and the School of Library Science are located. The building consists of reinforced concrete , is 14 upper floors high, has two basement floors and a triangular basic shape. The edge length of the equilateral triangle measures 100.6 meters. The house offers a total of 96,244 square meters of usable space, of which 6503 square meters are allocated to the Thomas Fischer Rare Books Library, 9,476 square meters to the Information Science Building and 80,265 square meters to the Robarts Library itself. Reinforced concrete - a total of over 76,450 cubic meters - was mainly used for the building. The walls of the massive building are about 30 centimeters thick.
In the basement there is not only a technical room but also a book archive that can hold up to two million volumes. On the first floor, in addition to the reception area, there is a map room, a large reading room and a few work niches, of which there are almost 1,000 throughout the building. The entrance area is on the second floor, which also houses a cafeteria, administration offices, exhibition space and a cloakroom. On the third floor there are additional work niches as well as the reading room for the microfilm archive and a copy service. The escalator only goes up to the fourth floor, where the main catalogs and a reading room for magazines are located next to the lending desk. From here you have a direct connection to the Rare Book Library via a mezzanine . State publications are kept on the fifth floor. The administrative offices, work and technical rooms are located in the sixth, seventh and east wing of the eighth floor. Floors 9 to 13 are only accessible to an authorized group of people via elevators from the fourth floor. Each floor has shelves for up to 400,000 books.
The building was designed by the New York architects Warner, Burns, Toan & Lunde together with the Canadian firm Mathers & Haldenby. The first drafts go back to 1960. After the construction was approved in 1966, work on it took four years and nine months. In July 1973 the work was completed and at the end of the month the structure was handed over to its intended use. The cost of building the library was approximately $ 41.7 million Canadian, which was equivalent to approximately $ 185.9 million in 2006.
The library building is characterized by the fact that it has no curves or right angles on the outside . The sometimes multiple angled lines and protruding elements make the building look like a turkey depending on the angle . With its typical exposed concrete facade, it is considered one of the most important buildings of brutalism in North America. The first two floors have almost no windows. The light is directed into the building through light shafts and narrow, vertical windows. The dominant structure is not without controversy and the concrete block, which for some seems massive, is rejected by a third of architecture students. The Canadian architect Ronald Thom even described the building as "arrogant and false". The massive, almost fortress-like structure earned the library the nickname "Fort Book".
Media and culture
Robarts Library appeared in the episode The One Where Joey Speaks French of the sitcom Friends . The outside of the library is shown briefly in one scene and was supposed to represent a New York hospital where Rachel - played by Jennifer Aniston - visits her father. The building was also seen as a huge prison building in the episode El Sid of the science fiction series Sliders - The Gate into a Foreign Dimension , which takes place in an alternative San Francisco .
Umberto Eco spent much of his time at Robarts Library creating his novel The Name of the Rose . Because of strong similarities, the Toronto library apparently served in part as a model for the stairwell of the secret library in the novel.
literature
- Allen Kent, Harold Lancour, Jay E. Daily: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , Marcel Dekker 1981, ISBN 978-0824720315 .
- ERA Architects: Concrete Toronto , Univ. of Chicago Press 2007, ISBN 978-1552451939 , pp. 164-173.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ About Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , p. 21
- ↑ About the Dictionary of Old English ( Memento of the original from May 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Toronto Star : Archivists embrace digital page , article by Peter Calamai on April 16, 2007
- ↑ Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library: Lewis Carroll collection ( Memento of the original from March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , p. 12
- ↑ a b c Robarts Library. 1973 and 2007 . In: shift , issue 2, March 2007 ( Memento of the original from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 9
- ^ Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , p. 13
- ^ Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , p. 14
- ↑ Concrete Toronto , p. 34
- ^ Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 31 - Toronto , p. 15
- ^ Brutalist Architecture in Ontario
- ↑ Ronald James Thom: Protest 1: a lesson for all in: Canadian Architect , August 1974
- ↑ University of Toronto press release: Robarts expansion to create more student spaces , February 26, 2008
- ↑ UofT Magazine: Are You There Robarts? It's me, Joe
- ^ Concrete Toronto , p. 164
Coordinates: 43 ° 39 '52 " N , 79 ° 23' 58" W.