Seeking your book donations!

By Elaina Vitale, Assistant Librarian

Sampling of books from Niels Bohr Library & Archives

At the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, we aim to preserve and make known the history of modern physics and its allied fields. The legacy of this hard work is visible in our robust archival, photographic and book collections, available to researchers across the world. These strong collections wouldn’t exist without generous materials donations from physicists, historians of science and their families. We’re grateful to our many 2015 book donors for helping us fill in the gaps in our collection.

We continue to seek unique book donations. Your book donation will help us document the history of physics, astronomy and geophysics from the 19th and 20th centuries. Our collection additionally covers astronomy, optics, vacuum science, rheology, crystallography and physics in medicine, as well as institutional histories and social aspects of the scientific community. Within these subjects, we collect textbooks, laboratory manuals, instruction manuals, conference proceedings, instrument catalogs, published correspondence and biographies. We have a particular interest in usefully annotated books. We’re currently working hard to boost our collections of titles in rheology, crystallography and meteorology.

Library book stacks

There are several ways to check if we already have copies of the books that you have:

1.  Our complete book catalog is found here, and can be checked by author or title.
2.  Send us a list of your books, including author, title, publisher and year of publication. We’ll check the titles and let you know what we need.
3.  Arrange a phone consultation.  
4.  For small collections, it's often easiest to ship all of them to us. We'll then go through them and either sell or return duplicate copies.

Donations are the foundation of our book collection. If you are interested in donating books to NBL&A or have questions, please contact Allison Rein, Assistant Director of Special Collections, at [email protected].

This article has been updated with current contact information.