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About the Barker Engineering Library

Tracy Gabridge and Howard Silver
Co-Head Librarians, Engineering and Science Libraries

Barker Engineering Library provides information to serve the teaching and research needs of the School of Engineering and all other instructional and research programs of the Institute that require materials in the engineering disciplines. The knowledgeable and friendly staff provides assistance and instruction on the use of the online catalog, electronic databases, e-journals and print collections.

Barker offers a premier engineering collection, quiet study space in a newly remodeled reading room, a media room with video conferencing, and group study spaces. The 6th and 7th floors house the majority of the library’s physical collections.

The main reading room of the Library is located on the fifth floor of Building 10, under the Great Dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This space has served as a library reading room since 1916, when the Institute moved to Cambridge from Boston, having constructed a group of imposing neoclassical buildings which today still comprise the center of the campus.

The library is named after James Madison Barker, Class of 1907, a distinguished alumnus and civil engineer who taught at MIT for seven years and later entered the business world. He was a member of the MIT Corporation for almost 40 years, being its oldest active member when he died in 1974 at age 88. Barker was an early leader in the field of international business who spoke eight languages, and had a lifelong interest in libraries and museums.