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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
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