Subjects

Hayden Library, located along the Charles River, is home to the Humanities and Science collections.

The Humanities collection supports MIT’s departments and programs in anthropology; archaeology; comparative media studies; foreign language and literature; history; linguistics and philosophy; literature; theater arts; women’s and gender studies; and science, technology, and society, including the history of science, technology, and medicine. It also contains MIT’s holdings in education; ethnic and minority studies; film, media, and cultural studies; and psychology. As the home of MIT’s general and recreational reading collection, the Humanities collection offers current fiction, graphic novels, travel books, audio books, DVDs of many popular films, and a wide range of journals, from the academic to the popular.

The Science collection provides extraordinary access to scholarship in the physical and life sciences, including the foundational materials for all of the science and engineering programs at MIT. The collection includes astronomy and astrophysics, atmospheric sciences and oceanography, biology, earth and planetary science, medicine, neuroscience, and nuclear science and engineering. The collections for biological engineering and materials science are shared between Hayden and Barker Engineering Library. Materials on the scientific aspects of the interdisciplinary subjects of energy and environment are also part of Hayden’s collection. The Map Room houses geologic, topographic, and other scientific maps and atlases.