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library system of the University of Chicago, one of
the largest university collections in North America,
contains well over 5,000,000 volumes. Classics students
may on occasion want to consult holdings in the Oriental
Institute, the D'Angelo
Law Library, or the John
Crerar Library of technology and science, but most
books and periodicals dealing with the ancient world
are concentrated in the Joseph
Regenstein Library.
Classics has been one of the strongest
parts of this collection since its first formation in
1891, when the University purchased the entire stock
of a collection in Berlin that specialized in classical
philology, archaeology, and science. In addition to
current monographs, the Library receives more than 700
serials devoted to ancient Greece and Rome. Major editions
of classical texts printed from the Renaissance through
the 18th century are found in the Department
of Special Collections, which also houses collections
of Greek and Latin manuscripts and a large reference
library devoted to paleography, manuscript catalogs,
and facsimiles.
Books not in the University system can
generally be obtained quickly through interlibrary loan
from the collections at the Center for Research Libraries
and the University of Illinois at Urbana. The database
of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is accessible over
the campus network; the Latin texts prepared by the
Packard Humanities Institute, the CETEDOC database of
ancient and medieval Christian Latin texts, and several
other electronic databases useful to the study of the
Classics are mounted on workstations in the Classics
Reading Room of the Regenstein Library. The Classics
Reading Room contains a full collection of Greek and
Latin texts and commentaries, as well as the epigraphical
collections, other basic resources, and comfortable
places to work and study with other classicists.
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