Libraries and Other Resources for Research
The Ohio State University Libraries include the Main Library and 14 department libraries and special collections on the Columbus campus. More than six million books and five million microforms are part of Ohio State's collection, which ranks as the 17th largest in North America.
The collection has been especially strong in books on Latin literature, and during recent decades, we have been rapidly strengthening our Greek holdings. Our holdings in Homeriana, medieval Greek manuscripts, and modern Greek literature are now among the finest in North America. Our large acquisitions budget allows us to continue to acquire Greek and Latin materials on a large scale.
Ohio State is a member of two important library consortia, OhioLINK (containing most colleges and universities in Ohio) and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (made up of 12 research universities in the Midwest). Each consortium has its own central library catalog, allowing Ohio State users to borrow materials from libraries at the universities of Chicago, Cincinnati, Illinois, Michigan, and others. Books arrive usually within three working days, much faster than traditional interlibrary loan. The consortia also jointly purchase electronic databases and online journals. For those users looking for additional research materials, Ohio State offers free international interlibrary loan service to graduate students and faculty.
The Main Library, located next to the Department's home in University Hall, also houses a number of databases. The bulk of this collection supports Classics, Greek and Latin, including dictionaries and grammars, text collections such as Oxford Classics Texts, Teubner and Loeb, indices such as L'Année Philologique and Synopsis, and the current issues of the leading quarterly and semiannual classics journals.
Located on Ohio State's West Campus is the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. The Epigraphy Center maintains an excellent library of books on epigraphy and palaeography, an extensive collection of photographs and squeezes of Greek and Latin inscriptions, and microfilms of Latin manuscripts. Scholars from throughout the world regularly visit Ohio State to use the Epigraphy Center, and convenient university bus service runs between the Epigraphy Center and the Department's home in University Hall.
The Department maintains its own library of basic texts and commentaries and all major reference works. The Department library is located in a room next to the graduate students' offices on the fourth floor of University Hall. The Department also operates the Forbes Technology Center, a dedicated computer cluster with educational software and thousands of digitized images from the Department's slide collection.