History
Initially, the system was a collection of 18,000 volumes stored in Morrill Hall. Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, donated his entire estate to the university upon his death, as did President Andrew Dickson White. Under Fiske's direction, Cornell's library introduced a number of innovations, including opening the stacks to undergraduate students, allowing undergraduates to check out books, and operating 9 hours per day from the earliest days of the library (instead of operating for only a few hours per week—as other libraries at American universities did at the time—just enough time for faculty to check out and return books), which allowed the patrons to use the facilities as a reference library.
Read more about this topic: Cornell University Library
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