Tomás Rivera Library walkway at UC Riverside (credit: placecadet/Flickr), Davidson College quad (credit: Melinda Young Stuart/Flickr), and Hathorn Hall at Bates College (credit: Odwalla/Wikimedia Commons)
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is pleased to announce its newest member institutions: Bates College, Davidson College, and the University of California, Riverside. The addition of these three schools grows CRL's membership total to 216 institutions.
“Davidson, Bates, and UC Riverside represent the breadth of CRL membership, as well as CRL’s commitment to leveraging its resources for higher learning institutions of all kinds, whether public or private, large or small, R1 or liberal arts,” says CRL president Greg Eow. “We’re honored to welcome these three schools to the CRL community.”
Located in Lewiston, Maine, Bates College was founded in 1855 as the first coeducational school in New England. The private liberal arts college enrolls some 1,800 students and is a member of the Colby Bates Bowdoin (CBB) Library Consortium. Its main campus library is the George and Helen Ladd Library, which serves not only Bates undergraduates but the wider geographical area and those in library professions. The Ladd Library also helped to acquire, catalog and house Dr. Krista Aronson’s Picture Book Project, which later grew into the Diverse Book Finder database.
Davidson College was founded in the North Carolina town of the same name in 1837. Also a private liberal arts college, Davidson hosts a student body of about 2,000. The E. H. Little Library holds some 500,000 physical volumes, with two special collections spaces: the Smith Rare Book Room and the Davidsoniania Room, which holds several thousand volumes by and pertaining to Davidson alumni and faculty. It also houses the college’s Center for Teaching and Learning, technology-enhanced classrooms, and group study rooms.
The University of California, Riverside was first founded in 1907 as the UC Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside. Its undergraduate College of Letters and Science opened in 1954; five years later, the UC Regents voted to make UC Riverside a "general" campus, establishing its graduate and professional programs. It now enrolls more than 26,000 students across its schools, including a satellite campus in Palm Desert. UC Riverside's two main libraries for research are the Tomás Rivera Library, which holds some 2,000,000 volumes in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, and the Raymond L. Orbach Science Library.
