William L. Clements Library
rare book library of the University of Michigan
The William L. Clements Library is a rare book and manuscript repository located on the University of Michigan's central campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Specializing in Americana and particularly North American history prior to the twentieth century, the holdings of the Clements Library are grouped into four categories: Books, Manuscripts, Graphics and Maps. The library's collection of primary source materials is expansive and particularly rich in the areas of social history, the American Revolution, and the colonization of North America. The Book collection includes 80,000 rare books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals. Within the other divisions, the library holds 600 atlases, approximately 30,000 maps, 99,400 prints and photographs, 134 culinary periodicals, 20,000 pieces of ephemera, 2,600 manuscript collections, 150 pieces of artwork, 100 pieces of realia, and 15,000 pieces of sheet music.
The Clements Library is visited by over 450 researchers yearly. Patrons include undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and scholars from around the world, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, David McCullough, who used the library's collections for the book 1776. The library building was designed by architect Albert Kahn.
History
William L. Clements, an alumnus and regent of the University of Michigan, founded the library in 1923. The library's initial collections were donated by Clements, an avid collector of materials relating to the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and the American Revolution.
The public source identifies “William L. Clements Library” as rare book library of the University of Michigan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around William, Clements and Library.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8014152. VIAF identifies the subject as 151315547. The Library of Congress control number is n84017513. Authority coordinates are 42.276, -83.738. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1776 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “William L. Clements Library” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.