University of Oklahoma - Museums and Libraries

Museums and Libraries

The university has two prominent museums, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

• The Museum of Art was founded in 1936 and originally headed by Oscar Jacobson, the director of the School of Art at the time. The museum opened with over 2,500 items on display and was originally located on campus in Jacobson Hall. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Jones of Oklahoma City donated money for a permanent building in 1971 and the building was named in honor of their son who died in a plane crash during his senior year at the University of Oklahoma. Since then, the museum has acquired many renowned works of Native American art and, in 2000, received the Weitzenhoffer Collection of French Impressionism which includes works by Degas, Gauguin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Vuillard. As of 2011 the museum has over 65,000 square feet (6,000 m²) filled with over 8,000 items from a wide array of time periods and movements. In 2005, the museum expanded with the opening of the new Lester Wing designed by contemporary architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen. The architectural style of the new addition deviates from the Collegiate Gothic style of the university, but Jacobsen felt this was necessary given the contemporary works of art the wing would house.
• The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, located south of the main campus and directly southwest of the law building, specializes in the history of the people and animals that have inhabited Oklahoma over the last 300 million years. Since its founding in 1899, the museum has acquired over 5,000,000 objects. In 2000, a new building was opened to house the ever expanding museum. The new building offered nearly 200,000 square feet (18,600 m²) of space to display the many exhibits the museum has to offer.

The University of Oklahoma Library system has its headquarters in Bizzell Memorial Library. The largest research library in Oklahoma, it contains over 4.7 million volumes and is ranked 27th out of 113 research libraries in North America in volumes held. It contains more than 1.6 million photographs, subscriptions to over 31,000 periodicals, over 1.5 million maps, government documents dating back to 1893, and over 50 incunabula. It has nine locations on campus. The primary library is Bizzell Memorial Library, located in the middle of the main campus. Other notable campus libraries include the Architecture Library, the Chemistry and Mathematics Library, the Engineering Library, the Fine Arts Library, the Physics and Astronomy Library, and the Geology Library. The OU library system contains many unique collections such as the History of Science Collections (which houses over 94,000 volumes related to the history of science, including hand-noted works by Galileo Galilei), the Bizzell Bible Collection, and the Western History Collection.

The School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), the only American Library Association-accredited program in Oklahoma, offers two graduate degrees (Master of Library and Information Studies and Master of Science in Knowledge Management) and one undergraduate degree (Bachelor of Arts in Information Studies). The impact of OU and SLIS on the history of libraries in Oklahoma is shown in the recent list of 100 Oklahoma Library Legends as produced by the Oklahoma Library Association. Two current faculty, one faculty emeriti, and numerous others associated with either the OU libraries or SLIS comprise nearly 10% of the list's members.