October Photos of the Month: Libraries!

It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that here at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, we’re big fans of, well, libraries. Libraries have been instrumental in collecting, preserving, and making accessible information in all forms, which has been crucial for the development of science. This month we are highlighting a few libraries within the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, many of which have been key hubs for the collection and dissemination of scientific knowledge over the last century or more.

This article would not be complete without a nod to our very own library. If you have visited our new website then you will likely recognize this picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer speaking at the dedication of the Niels Bohr Library. If you have visited the library in person though, you would also know that the library looks quite different today, as we moved from New York to our current location in College Park, Maryland, in 1993.

While certainly the most well-known attendee, Oppenheimer was not the only one to speak at the dedication ceremony. The ceremony was led by Ralph A. Sawyer, and other speakers included George Uhlenbeck, Richard Courant, and Hettie Heineman. While he was not present at the event due to poor health, our namesake Niels Bohr did send a written speech which Sawyer read. The library was named after Bohr by his friend and colleague Dannie Heineman, who provided the funding to found the library. We recently made the speeches available in our digital repository, including the audio . If you are a more visual person, you can also read the speech Oppenheimer delivered, Reflections on the Resonances of Physics History published ten years after the occasion, or you can read the first typewritten publication of the speech. In addition, the audio is also available on YouTube .

This sure looks like a cozy study space, doesn’t it? As a librarian, however, I nearly had a heart attack when I first saw it. Can you spot why?

It’s because of the fireplace! Aside from the obvious problem that fire and books do not go well together (if you have ever read The Library Book by Susan Orlean, you’ll understand why librarians are especially terrified of fires in their collections), the residual smoke and soot from the fireplace could easily stain and otherwise damage the books. Luckily, safety and preservation standards for libraries have evolved quite a bit since 1912-1914, the year range when this photograph was taken. We also have the benefit of modern climate control systems, so we no longer need to rely on fireplaces to stay warm. Safety and preservation concerns aside, this must have been a lovely space for the physicists of UIUC to use, and I am only slightly jealous that study spaces like this are much rarer nowadays. This library would have been built in 1909 when a dedicated physics building was constructed at the university, the physics department having previously been housed in Engineering Hall, and University Hall before that.

Established in 1941 in Norwalk, Connecticut, the Burndy Library held one of the largest collections of books on the history of science and technology for its time. The library was founded by engineer, industrialist, and historian of science Bern Dibner out of his personal collection and boasted among its holdings one of the most complete sets of Isaac Newton’s works, including works annotated by Newton himself, as well as original works by Louis Pasteur and many more. The collection grew rapidly—by 1985 the collection boasted over 30,000 volumes, and that was after the library donated a quarter of the collection to the Smithsonian in 1974 to form the core of their Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology . After Dibner’s passing in 1988 the library was moved to the campus of MIT, however after a decade the collection needed to be moved yet again due to the impending demolition of the building housing it. Luckily in 2006 the collection found a new home when all 67,000 volumes (including 47,000 rare books) were transferred to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where they remain as part of one of the largest and most important collections on the history of science in North America today.

Speaking of the Huntington Library, we have a photo of that too! Founded in 1919 by Henry E. and Arabella Huntington, The Huntington includes not just the library but also a botanical garden and art museum. Rightly calling itself “one of the world’s great independent research libraries,” the Huntington Library holds around 12 million items spanning from the 11^th to 21^st centuries and hosts over 20,000 visits from researchers around the world every year. Among its over a dozen general book collections is the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Collection, which is the current home for the Burndy collection. Other notable collections include the largest collection of Isaac Newton materials outside England (thanks to the Burndy acquisition), the Edwin Powell Hubble papers (digitized !), the Aerospace Oral History Project , and much more. We are jealous to say that their copy of Ptolomy’s Almagest is nearly two centuries older than our copy from 1528.

As seen previously, many great library collections start with personal collections, such as this one. After retiring as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, astrophysicist George Ellery Hale built the Hale Solar Laboratory in 1925 as his personal workshop to pursue his interest in heliophysics. It was here, surely with the help of this lovely library collection, that Hale invented the spectrohelioscope, which you can learn more about in our June Photos of the Month from earlier this year! The laboratory continued to be used for many years after Hale’s death in 1938, including by Mount Wilson astronomers Harold and Horace Babcock, who in 1952 invented the first solar magnetograph there. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989, the laboratory is now privately owned with the library still intact. Fun fact: Hale also had a great interest in Egyptology—the bust on top of the shelf on the left is of ancient Egyptian king Akhnaton, a worshipper of the sun god Aton.

Here we have another example of a small library housed in a small observatory. The Warner and Swasey Observatory was built in 1919 outside Cleveland, Ohio, by Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey, founders of the Warner and Swasey Company which developed machine tools and precision instruments (like telescopes). The two had just become trustees of the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) and built the observatory as a gift to the school. The observatory was used for decades and was home to several important studies, but its time was relatively short-lived. Because of its location near the Cleveland urban area, encroaching light pollution from the expanding metropolis rendered the observatory increasingly unusable over the years. In 1957 the 24-inch telescope it had been using was moved to Geauga County, 30 miles eastward, and then it was moved again to Kitt Peak National Observatory in 1979, where it remains today. Meanwhile the Warner and Swasey acquired a 36-inch telescope which was used for public viewing until the observatory closed permanently in 1980. Today it sadly lies as an abandoned and overgrown ruin. Luckily the items in the library survived this closure—I reached out to the friendly archivists at CWRU who informed me that the Astronomy Department, which was formerly housed in the Observatory, was moved to the main campus in 1982. At this time, the library’s materials were absorbed into the university’s main collections, with some being transferred to the University Archives and others to the main library.

Most library students will learn early on about scholar S.R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person has his or her book.
3. Every book has its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

I think this photo is an excellent demonstration of law number five. All professional libraries are constantly expanding and changing, and for academic libraries, journal subscriptions are a key factor in this expansion. This photo shows the staff of the Astrophysical Journal posing with volumes of the journal in 1997—eighteen years before the journal went digital-only. While it is not entirely clear why they chose to stack the volumes like this, it is reminiscent of this similar photograph of Val Fitch posing with bound volumes of the Physical Review in order to demonstrate the journal’s growth from 1918 to 1978. Regardless of whether these books were stacked for a similar reason, we can assume that the Astrophysical Journal experienced significant growth. Here’s hoping the library had plenty of available space to accommodate the later issues!

More than simply repositories of knowledge, libraries are often architectural works of art which occupy places of geographic and cultural prominence in their communities, whether they be an academic library on a university campus or a public library in a city’s urban core. This library seems to be a striking example of a smaller branch library that was still built to be a landmark, with its memorable pagoda-style curved roofing and round glass walls. Unfortunately, it does not seem that this library exists anymore—while I was not able to find direct proof, it seems likely that the building was demolished as part of a renovation of Lake Forest College’s science center in the 2018-19 academic year. Most likely its collections were either rehoused within the new facility or within the college’s main library.

Sadly, not all libraries meet as civilized an end as the Freeman or the Burndy. For as long as libraries have existed, they have been caught in the crosshairs of war and fallen victim to natural disasters or, as we have seen, abandonment. Indeed, in times of conflict libraries are often targeted specifically for their cultural significance—to destroy a nation’s library is often to attack the nation’s very history and identity, as seen with the burning of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, for example. The near-destruction of the library at the University of Göttingen in WWII, pictured here, does not seem to be an example of such intentional targeting but rather was a result of an air raid bombing in 1944, and probably further military activity when the United States captured the city the following year. Fortunately, the library’s holdings managed to remain “comparatively unharmed.” Today the library has been rebuilt as a vibrant and modern research facility as the Göttingen State and University Library, and with approximately 9 million items in its holdings, it is one of the largest libraries in Germany.

Libraries would be nothing without the dedicated workers who make the magic happen. Here we see NBLA’s longest-serving librarian and director Joan Warnow-Blewett seated with physicist and historian of science Silvan “Sam” Schweber (more about him in this blog post ). Warnow-Blewett joined AIP as Librarian in 1965, before the Center for History of Physics was even founded. Nine years later in 1974 she was promoted to Associate Director of the center, a role she held until her retirement in 1997. During her time, she oversaw many great changes and projects that made the library and history programs the successes they are today. Among other things, she pioneered the “documentation strategy” approach to preserving the history of the physical sciences with projects such as the Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations. She also spearheaded the creation of the International Catalog of Sources, a tool used to find physics-related archival collections globally all in the NBLA catalog, and oversaw the move of the library from New York to its current location in College Park, Maryland, in 1993. She was also highly active in the library and archives community; thanks to her work, AIP won the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of American Archivists in 1985. It is safe to say that much of the success of NBLA and the history team can be attributed to her ingenuity and hard work, and that generations of researchers owe her a debt of gratitude.

We began this post with the founding of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, so it feels fitting to conclude with where we are today. This photo of NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman, was taken in 2012 in the reading room of the NBLA. Not much about the space has changed since then; as I type this, I can see the exact table where she viewed her papers from where I sit, and the bust of Niels Bohr is of course still there. Just as the library would be nothing without its workers, it would also be nothing without its friends like Roman, who donated the bulk of her papers to us in 1994 along with a second batch of materials in 2006 . Our library relies primarily on donations to grow (remember Ranganathan’s law number five?), so such gifts like this are crucial ways for us to carry on our work preserving and telling the stories of the physical sciences. Perhaps you would like to join us in that work by sharing your stories too?

References
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . “Picture of the Week.” Illinois Physics Condensate. Accessed August 5, 2025. https://condensate.physics.illinois.edu/
Cohen, I. Bernard. “Inside The Burndy Library.” Invention and Technology, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1985). https://web.archive.org/web/20150921025303/https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/inside-burndy-library-1
“The Library.” The Huntington, accessed September 16, 2025. https://www.huntington.org/library
Butowsky, Harry A. “Hale Solar Laboratory.” Astronomy and Astrophysics: Excerpts from a National Historic Landmark Theme Study. May 1985, last modified November 5, 2001. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/butowsky5/astro4a.htm
Mt. Wilson Observatory. “Discovering Mount Wilson Chapter 15: Hale Solar Laboratory.” September 21, year unknown. Accessed September 16, 2025. https://www.mtwilson.edu/discovering-mount-wilson-chapter-15-hale-solar-laboratory/
J. Mark Souther, “Warner and Swasey Observatory,” Cleveland Historical. September 14, 2012. Accessed September 16, 2025, https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/551.
“History.” Göttingen State and University Library. Accessed September 16, 2025. https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/en/about-us/history/
Anderson, Joe. “JOAN WARNOW-BLEWETT RETIRES.” December 12, 1997. https://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/asa/stama/mail/msg00173.html