Barco Law Building - Barco Law Library

Barco Law Library

The largest element in the building, the Barco Law Library on floors three, four, and five, serves as the "laboratory" for the work of both students and faculty and is an important information center for practicing lawyers and for scholars from other disciplines. The current collection numbers some 425,000 volumes and volume equivalents and has a seating capacity, in both the individual carrels and in private reading areas, of over 400. The fourth floor is the library's nerve center, containing the circulation desk, the reference desk and reference collection, modern indexing tools, group-study rooms, a microform room, an audiovisual room, and the Harold Obernauer Computerized Legal Research Center. The Obernauer Center, opened in 1987, gives Pitt Law students access to personal computer equipment for research, word processing, and programmed courses of instruction. A permanent endowment helps ensure that the school can maintain the quality of the library and respond fully to the teaching and research missions of the law school, as well as to provide a continuing learning resource for practitioners in the law. Faculty offices ring the perimeter of the library on floors three and five. The library also contains an art gallery with rotating exhibits.