History and Collections

The Frohring Library moved into renovated facilities in 1999, thanks to a generous donation from the Paul and Maxine Frohring Foundation, and has further increased its spaces in the following years.

This professionally run facility offers students and faculty direct access to its collections. There are four study rooms, a multimedia lab and a media room where students and faculty with personal laptop computers can access a wide range of research tools and resources that support the university's liberal arts curriculum.

The Library's current collection about 30,000 items includes monographs, hard-copy journals, newspapers, videos, DVDs and CD-ROMs. Its electronic resource collection, available via the Library portal throughout campus, consists of a growing number of online databases, including reference sources (Credo Reference, Encyclopedia Britannica, Oxford Reference On-line, Grove Dictionary of Art and Grove Dictionary of Music), and full text collections (Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia International Affairs On-line, Ebsco's Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, Communication and Mass Media Complete, JSTOR, Lexis Nexis, ARTSTOR, Project Muse).

Face to face research and information services are provided by a Reference Librarian. For distance users, digital reference services are available via the Library Portal.

The library is a charter member of AMICAL, the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries, participates with its holdings in Worldcat and partners with Italian libraries for document delivery and interlibrary loan services.