Libraries

Library Resources

The resources of the Stevenson Library and the satellite libraries—in the Levy Economics Institute and the Center for Curatorial Studies on the Annandale campus, and in the Bard Graduate Center in New York City—include 400,000 volumes and access to more than 80 databases and 50,000-plus online journals. Resource-sharing consortiums provide access to six million additional volumes. The Sussman Rare Book Collection, which is housed at the Stevenson Library, contains more than 1,200 items, including the 1493 Liber Chronicarum history of the world, two editions (1556 and 1680) of Magna Carta, and a 1792 first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. 

Library Locations

Special Collections

The Bard College Archives preserve the intellectual and social history of the College and its place in the development of progressive liberal education. Special print collections include the complete personal library of the late political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt, and her husband, the late Bard professor Heinrich Bluecher, as well as the collected Senior Projects of Bard students since 1938. In recent years the library has also received substantial gifts from the estates of Marius Bewley, a noted literary critic, and Olin Dows, a painter in the Federal Art Project. The Bard Digital Collections include photographs going back to 1913; the Bard family papers; Poetry at Bard, an audio collection of readings and talks at the College; and Bard Makes Noise, an ongoing Web-based project of Bard bands and musicians past and present.