The St. John's University Libraries'
collections – in libraries across all five campuses – contain more
than 1.5 million items, including books, periodicals, microfilm,
microfiche and audiovisual materials, all supportive of the
undergraduate and graduate programs of the University. The
guidelines by which the Libraries acquire and retain items in the
collections are detailed in the
Collection Development Policy Statement.
The Main Library is a selective depository for
U.S. government
documents and also houses such collections as the
Media Center,
containing a wide variety of video, CDs, interactive CD-ROMs and
A-V hardware; an
Instructional
Materials Center, containing pre-K-12 curriculum materials;
Special
Collections, which includes the William M. Fischer Lawn Tennis
Collection, Rare and Limited Edition books, and the Reference Art
File, a unique collection of art exhibition catalogs from the late
1960s through the early 1980s; and the
University
Archives. The Chin Ying Asian Library, located in Sun Yat Sen
Hall on the Queens campus, contains a selection of Asian-language
and English-language resources related to the history, literature,
arts, languages, business/economics, political science, philosophy
and religions of East Asia.
Other St. John's libraries also have specialized collections that
support the curricula on their campuses. In particular, these
include the
Rittenberg Law
Library on the Queens campus and the
Kathryn and Shelby Cullom
Davis Library on the Manhattan campus.
In addition to traditional physical materials, computer terminals
located throughout each library provide access to a wide variety of
electronic resources. These include the catalogs of the St. John's
Libraries; the catalogs of more than two dozen consortium
libraries; bibliographic and electronic full-text databases; and
much more. These
resources
are available both on and off campus via the world wide web. In
addition, cooperative arrangements with other libraries provide
regional, national and international access to materials through
Interlibrary
Services.