Intellectual Coverage | Access to the Library and its collections
The Modern Languages and Linguistics Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign acquires and maintains literature and language materials for the Germanic and Romance languages, as well as for comparative literature and linguistics. The major Germanic languages we cover include German, Yiddish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Dutch. Our Romance coverage includes Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Our linguistics collection is international in scope, representing virtually all languages of the world. The library gives particular attention to the study and research needs of students and faculty within the departments of French, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Linguistics, and Comparative and World Literature.
The Modern Languages and Linguistics Library's collections total approximately 850,000 volumes, of which 17,000 can be found in the unit itself. Our remaining volumes are scattered throughout the University Library collection, including the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, the Reference Library, and the main bookstacks. Our reference section contains general and specialized bibliographies, histories of literature, biographical dictionaries, encyclopedias, periodical indexes, literary guides, and linguistics resources. Our reading room offers current scholarly journals, international newspapers and popular magazines, and a circulating collection.
Among our world-renowned collections are those concerning Marcel Proust (the world's largest collection), Rainer Maria Rilke, the Spanish Golden Age, Catalan language and literature, the Italian Renaissance, Old Icelandic literature, seventeenth-century German Baroque literature, emblem books from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and theoretical and applied linguistics. Our extensive holdings in German literature were a major component of the Library's Humanities Preservation Microfilming Project, an endeavor funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Some of the authors strongly represented in our collections include Proust, Rilke, Dante, Petrarch, Voltaire, Stendhal, Luther, Goethe, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Hebbel, Strindberg, Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and St. Teresa of Avila.
In 1993, the University Library established the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research, which houses the research data produced by the late Philip Kolb, a University of Illinois professor of French who spent nearly fifty years compiling and editing a twenty-one volume set of Proust's correspondence. The Archive includes Kolb's notes, photocopies of many Proust letters, Kolb's Proust-related correspondence, and Kolb's own collection of books and journal articles. The goal of the Archive project is to make this material available to scholars world-wide via the Internet.
Access to the Library and its collections
The Modern Languages and Linguistics Library is on the fourth floor, south corridor, of the Main Library building. The stairway from the Gregory Drive entrance to the Main Library provides direct access to the Modern Languages and Linguistics Library; a public elevator is located on the east side of the building.
As you enter the Modern Languages and Linguistics library, the circulation and information desk is on your right. Directly across from the desk is our New Books Shelf. The main circulating collection is located in the shelving behind the New Books Shelf. We also keep recent volumes of many bound periodicals on these shelves. Our Modern Hebrew Literature collection is located in the southwest corner of the room. The current scholarly journals, arranged alphabetically, are housed on the non-circulating west wall of the main reading room. Monographs circulate for up to sixteen weeks.
Four public computer workstations provide access to the University Library Gateway, which in turn can direct you to the online catalog, to article databases offered by the University Library system, to the homepages of the departmental libraries, and to a wealth of other resources. The library also offers electronic resources, including several literary and newspaper databases, most are available through the Library's Online Research Resources or at the Modern Languages and Linguistics Library's cd-rom workstation.
Our reference collection is housed in the shelves adjacent to the circulation desk. Many of the best resources in the reference collection are cited in our Literature and Linguistics Reference Sources webpages, and you may access these resources by selecting the language or area studies links listed on our home page.
The Reserve Room is the first door on the left in the hall behind the circulation desk; we keep periodical articles placed on reserve at the circulation desk. You may use reserve materials in the Reserve Room proper, or you may check them out from the library for up to two hours. You must check out a desk reserve item in order to use it inside or outside of the library. We have a copying machine in the Reserve Room which accepts change and copy cards (a change machine and a copy card machine are located near the second-floor main circulation desk). Additionally, the Reserve Room houses our Proustiana collection and our Masters collections.
Our librarians are available to answer your reference questions, to offer term-paper counseling, and to assist with bibliographic searching from Monday through Friday between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. You may arrange for tours and instruction on the use of the Modern Languages and Linguistics Library by appointment with the librarians.
