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About the Barker Engineering Library

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

Barker Engineering Library and its branch, the Aeronautics and Astronautics Library, provide 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.

Barker offers a premier engineering collection, as well as two clusters of Athena terminals. The Information Desk provides assistance in use of the online catalog and electronic databases, as well as an entrée into both the electronic and the print collections of engineering information from all over the world.

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.

A major renovation of the late 1960's was made possible by the generosity of 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.

The 1970 renovation opened up the reading room so that the dome was again visible. A suspended ceiling and an enormous light fixture reputed to be the largest in the world had obscured the dome itself. The remodeling included specially-designed furniture, lighting, shelving, and acoustic materials, which Architectural Record said "juxtaposed a geometry, based on an intricate system of intersecting diagonals, with the classic form of the dome's interior."

The newly-designed library provided for book stack space on the sixth, seventh, and eighth floors, as well as accommodations for pioneering experiments ongoing at MIT in the electronic transfer of information, a precursor of today's computer applications in libraries.