The John Miller Burnam Classical Library is named after a former faculty member of the Classics Department, whose excellent private library was willed to the University and became the nucleus of the present library in 1921. The collection was greatly expanded through the personal efforts and generosity of a former chairman of the Department and his wife, William T. and Louise Taft Semple. Entire collections were purchased and provided an in depth comprehensive retrospective collection. Mrs. Semple later established a trust fund in honor of her father Charles Phelps Taft that continues to be the primary collection support for the collection and has made the library a major international research collection in the area of Classical Studies.
Today, collection efforts focus comprehensively on all aspects of the ancient Greek and Roman world, including the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Library materials, in print and other formats, cover history, archaeology, language and literature, art, numismatics, science and technology, papyrology, epigraphy and patristics. The Classics Library offers extensive coverage in materials on Byzantine and Modern Greece and strong coverage in titles on Egypt and the Ancient Near East and on paleography.
Library holdings currently total nearly 234,000 items. The Classics Library currently subscribes to approximately 2,000 serials and monographic sets. These subscriptions permit our users to have access to extensive holdings in the major periodicals and serials in Classical Studies. Most of the collection is comprised of monographs and journals; however, the library offers access to many electronic databases specific to the field of classics, including the major bibliographic indexes: L’Annee Philologique and Dyabola. In addition, the library owns many subject specific databases and paper indexes, along with important image databases. Additionally, the library has a significant collection of 19th century German dissertations and Programmschriften, as well as microform and audio-visual holdings.
The library’s growth rate is approximately 5000 volumes per year. Recent purchases have strengthened the holdings in the areas of patristics, papyrology, and early editions of Greek and Latin authors. Classics researchers have also benefited from electronic resources supplied by OhioLINK and the University of Cincinnati Libraries, including electronic versions of over 5,000 journals on the Electronic Journal Center at OhioLINK and the locally supported JSTOR packages. Electronic copies of monographs are made available in NetLibrary, the History E-Book Project, Oxford Reference Online, the Making of America collection, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and the Early English Books Online. Finally, the collection of Hebrew Union College is useful in providing supplemental material, especially in the areas of Near Eastern archaeology and Judaic studies.
Selection of current materials, at an upper-division and graduate/research level in all European languages, is as exhaustive as possible; likewise, retrospective purchasing is actively pursued. When new serial subscriptions are established, available back volumes are purchased. Although a majority of materials are purchased through individual titles, we have three foreign language approval plans: Harrassowitz (begun in the 1960's); Casalini (1986); and, Puvill (mid 1980’s). English language titles are provided by Yankee and supplemented by slips from B.H. Blackwell.
Classics Library staff directly contact foreign universities for dissertations. Finally, exchange programs exist with approximately twenty organizations, most of which are in Eastern Europe. These exchanges are handled directly by the Classics Library.
Graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars, including the numerous Tytus Scholars, regard the Burnam Classical Library as an excellent research facility both because of the collection’s breadth, including many titles that are not widely found in other U.S. library collections, and the fact that materials on all subjects pertinent to Classics are available within this one library, making research as convenient as possible for scholars.
Classics Library web site http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/classics/index.html
09/04/08 JWR