Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives Department preserves, creates, and shares knowledge about the past, present, and future of the life sciences. The Library is home to a specialized collection of books, journals, and online materials with an emphasis on bioinformatics, cancer research, genetics, molecular biology, neurobiology, and plant genetics. Our mission is to provide our scientists, staff and graduate students, and meeting and course participants, with scientific information and access to a state-of-the-art scientific library. The Library provides current and retrospective scientific information, access to computerized information sources, timely information for departments and support staff, and current materials of general interest for staff and their families. The CSHL Archives are a major repository of primary material on the history of the life sciences and medical research in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to institutional records from the lab, its precursor institutions, and its funding bodies, the archives contain personal collections of nearly three dozen significant individuals from CSHL and around the world, a large repository of oral-history interviews, and documents from nearly a century’s worth of international symposia on the life sciences. The CSHL Library and Archives are also home to the Center for Humanities & History of Modern Biology, created in 2018 to establish a permanent place for the humanities at CSHL, one of the world’s premier private, nonprofit scientific research institutions. For more about the Center and a link to the Center's website, see the article below.