Original Name
Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBLM)
Institution Type
Library
Country
United States
Address
Columbia University Libraries
535 W. 114th Street
New York, NY 10027
Telephone
+212 854 51 53
Email
rbml@libraries.cul.columbia.edu
Website
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/rbml
Description
RBML is the largest of Columbia’s special collections, containing more than 500,000 rare books, 30 million manuscripts files in some 4,500 separate collections, 75,000 photographs, and40,000 prints, drawings, and works of art. Materials range in date from 2000 BCE to the present and include material related to most subject areas. Today, Columbia is one of three major institutions in the USA (along with the Hoover Institution [Stanford] and the Library of Congress) that have extensive collections of ephemera and samizdat from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, mostly located in the following collections:
- Soviet and East European Independent Press Collection (almost 800 archival boxes) consists of more than 2,000 titles of periodicals and newspapers (many of them complete runs), as well as thousands of leaflets, broadsides and posters.
The collection documents and illustrates the transition to democracy (1988-1991) in the region, and the first free elections throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
- The Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research is being established to collect, process, preserve, make available for research, and display the historic records of various human rights organizations. Currently holding over 3000 linear feet of documents from the archives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA, the Center will be open and provide equal access to scholars, students, human rights activists and the larger public. The over-1,000 linear feet of material, documenting groundbreaking investigations into human rights abuses around the world, includes correspondence, clippings, mission files, country reports, photographs, and audio and videotapes created by and relating to HRW's various projects.
- Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture
The Archive's collection focuses on émigré communities from Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as American views of the area and our relations with it. The Archive contains approximately one million eight hundred thousand items in over 1500 collections dating from the 15th through the 21st century and attracts more then a thousand researchers each year.
ISRA Affiliation Level
subscriber
