From the archives: The story “UGA's library achieving national prominence” was originally published in The Atlanta Journal on August 14, 1985.
A half-million scientific items, 16,000 of the very best radio and television programs ever aired, 63,000 bits of Margaret Mitchell's life, and the one, the only, the original Confederate Constitution.
All of those intellectual treasures and historical oddments - take your pick - are stashed away in Athens, in a library now officially recognized as one of the best in the Southeast and one of the fastest growing in the country.
It is the University of Georgia library, a collection of 2.3 million books, periodicals, microfilms and other collectible parts of the world's wisdom.
While it may be little known to most Georgians, and off the beaten track even for a certain number of university undergraduates, UGA's library is gaining prestige among its peers. It is now officially the 30th best research library in the country, according to a recent ranking by the Association of Research Libraries. UGA moved up one notch from the 1984 rankings, passing Northeastern University in Boston.
In the Southeast, UGA's library yields only to those of the University of North Carolina (17th) and the University of Virginia (25th). In the Atlanta area, Emory University was 64th and Georgia Tech was 84th.
UGA's trove of 2.3 million volumes includes a huge variety of material, running from the topical to the historic, from political and literary manuscripts to unbelievably numerous and abstruse technical and scientific works. Some examples:
The papers of the late Richard Russell, who represented Georgia in the U.S. Senate for 38 years, and the Senate papers of former U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge. The Margaret Mitchell collection includes the papers of Atlanta's all-time favorite daughter, the author of "Gone with the Wind."
Collections in scientific fields that head librarian David Bishop views as very strong. One indication of the library's depth in that area is in "serials" - principally the scholarly journals that academics use to tell other academics about new developments in the fields.
"I would have a difficult time off the top of my head saying how many (scientific) serials we have, " Bishop said. "It would be safe to say we have 5,000 to 6,000 titles."
The world's largest collection of things printed in the Confederacy during its short life. "We have half of the known items in existence, " Bishop said. "We try to buy anything else that comes to market."
Among those items is the Confederate Constitution, which is brought out of its vault for public viewing once a year on Confederate Memorial Day.
The Peabody Collection, which includes every radio and television program ever submitted for the prestigious Peabody Awards. "With the exception of some things which have been lost or misplaced, we have a complete record of all the very best radio back to the 1940s, and all the best television back to its inception, " Bishop said.
All these things, and many more, and the ability to collect many, many more, are what makes a research library great, according to Bishop. "What brought us up (in the national rankings) is just plain, good, solid, sustained growth, " he said. "The growth of the collections and the book budget has grown each year."
Indeed, the library plans to add more than 100,000 bound volumes and about 150,000 microfilms and microfiches this fiscal year. The library spent $3.8 million on acquisitions last year, a figure that has steadily increased from the $2.4 million of 1980-81.
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