The John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin University Library
The John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library – The John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library undergirds the academic life of Fisk University. The contemporary, brick and glass library building consists of 74,610 square feet and was completed in 1969. It is one of the most functional library buildings in the area. The Franklin Library’s automated catalog offers local and remote searching of holdings, and a network of computer workstations provide students and faculty convenient on-campus access to email and internet. Patrons can also request materials from another library system or institution through interlibrary loan. Cooperative agreements allow students and faculty to use and borrow materials from Belmont University’s Lila D. Bunch Library and from Vanderbilt University Libraries, including the Eskind Biomedical Library. An access pass, required on nights and weekends at Vanderbilt, is available for checkout at the Access Services (Circulation) desk. Additionally, the Franklin Library participates in the Tennessee Academic Library Cooperative (TALC), an alliance between thirty-seven public and private non-profit, post-secondary, academic libraries in the State of Tennessee. Through TALC, currently enrolled students and currently employed full-time and part-time faculty and staff are given borrowing privileges at participating libraries. The library also provides a variety of electronic resources including, databases, full-text journal articles, and full-text books. Electronic resources include, but are not limited to, Lexis-Nexis, Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL), JSTOR, eBooks on EBSCOhost, APA PsycNET, and Oxford African American Studies Center.
The John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin University Library houses over 260,000 volumes representative of the academic disciplines at Fisk. In addition, the Franklin Library serves as a selective depository for Federal government documents. The Franklin Library correlates its program with the academic programs of the University by providing carefully selected books and related materials for classroom instruction and independent study and research geared to promote lifelong reading and research habits. Library orientation is available to assist students in familiarizing themselves with the collections, facilities, and services offered. In addition, the library conducts Information Literacy sessions to ensure students develop skills needed to successfully address the vast array of print and online sources.
The Franklin Library’s Special Collections and Archives of unique and rare materials is internationally recognized as an invaluable center for research in African American history and culture. There are over 50,000 titles on Africans and African Americans worldwide. There are also related materials of 2,600 records; 500 pieces of sheet music; and 3,400 newspapers, periodicals, journals, theses, and dissertations. Many of these documents are on microfilm. The Archives section of the Franklin Library houses the records of the University, including those of past presidents, faculty, and staff. Among these records are those of the Fisk Jubilee Singers®, the institution’s founding president Erastus Milo Cravath, and its first African American president Charles Spurgeon Johnson. Outside organizations whose records are represented in the Archives include: the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Sigma Pi Phi fraternity, and the Association of Black Physicists. The manuscript collections include the personal papers of W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Aaron Douglas, James Weldon Johnson, William Levi Dawson, Thomas A. Dorsey, George Edmund Haynes, W. C. Handy, Thomas W. Talley, James Carroll Napier, John Mercer Langston, John W. Work III, Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. There is also an extensive collection of photographs by Carl Van Vechten. In addition to collections on African Americans, the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library holds the papers of Geoffrey Handley-Taylor; Sir Ralph Perring, Lord Mayor of London and Winifred Holtby. The George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature also offers a wealth of materials for research in music.
Complementing the Franklin Library’s written sources is the Black Oral History Collection, with over 800 taped interviews with persons who have been eyewitnesses, participants, or contributors to the African American experience. The Franklin Library is also a repository for the transcripts of the Black Women Oral History Project of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. For preservation and fast access, the library is actively digitizing materials from selected collections.