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 ...

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 Harvard Library is the umbrella organization for Harvard University's libraries and services. It is the oldest library system in the United States and both the largest academic library and largest private library in the world. Its collection ...

'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 liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and h ...

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 the ...

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 Littauer and Litauer are German language surnames. The word means "a Lithuanian". The surnames may refer to: * Florence Littauer (1928–2020), Christian writer and motivational speaker * Lucius Littauer (1859–1944), politician, businessman, a ...

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