The Hoover Library Collection at Its Centenary: History, Themes, Access, and Challenges

For more than eighty years, the collection of the Hoover Institution Library grew as part of an ambitious endeavor to preserve literature, materials, and fugitive documents on wars, revolutions, and their consequences. Today, the collection retains a wealth of diverse, often rare, and sometimes still only superficially explored publications on crucial themes in twentieth-century European and Russian/Soviet history. This article highlights key characteristics of the collection and outlines various perspectives from which it is still of high interest to users. Also discussed are the collection’s structure and organization as well as past, present, and future issues of access and discovery.