The Chapin Library is closed to readers and visitors until September 2008. All reference services have been suspended, and no exhibitions are on view in Stetson Hall.

In advance of the planned renovation of Stetson Hall and construction of an adjacent library/technology center, the Chapin Library must move its operations to temporary quarters in summer 2008. Three apartments in the historic Southworth Schoolhouse, near campus on the corner of Southworth and School Streets, will serve as the reading room and offices of both the Chapin Library and the Archives and Special Collections department of the Williams College Library. The bulk of the Chapin holdings will be stored in off-site high-density shelving until the new Stetson-Sawyer complex opens in 2011, and will not be generally available for use in the interim. A small working collection, however, will be kept at the Southworth Schoolhouse, while the Founding Documents of the United States are on temporary display in the Williams College Museum of Art.


Future Exhibitions

The Chapin Library has suspended its exhibition program during a period of temporary relocation of staff and holdings and Stetson-Sawyer construction in 2008-2011. In the interim, some of the Library's holdings, including the Founding Documents, will be on display at the Williams College Museum of Art.

Past Exhibitions

       This list includes only exhibitions presented in recent years:

• Four Centuries of American Women: From Pocohontas to Augusta Read Thomas
• Pauline Baynes: Illustrations for Children's Books
• George Washington: A Life to Be Celebrated, a Death to Be Remembered
• Ruskin and His Age: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the Death of John Ruskin, 1819-1900
• Seeing the Orients: Europe and America Discover the Middle East
• Design Envisions/Envisioning Design
• Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Printers: Handprinted Books from the Hogarth Press
• Herman Melville: A Retrospective of His Works on the 150th Anniversary of Moby-Dick
• Eating and Etiquette in the 19th Century: Selections from the Eleanor T. Fordyce Collection of American Cookbooks
• North: Travels to the Arctic and Other Northern Lands
• Samuel Butler: The Mid-Victorian Modern Revisited
• Culture, Society, and Disease
• Reading Material: The Incarnation of Ideas
• The Heavens Revealed: Classics of Astronomy from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Einstein from the Collection of Professor Jay M. Pasachoff
• 1753-1754-1755: Culture and Conflict at the Birth of Williamstown
• John DePol: American Wood Engraver
• Churchill: The Life of a Politician and Author PDF
• The Book as a Work of Art: The Cranach Press of Count Harry Kessler
• Theodore Roosevelt: In His Own Right, 1904-2004 PDF
• "She Loved All Great Formal, Noble Things": A Willa Cather Miscellany
• Don Quixote: A Quatercentenary Celebration of the Man of La Mancha
• Herman Rosse: Designs for Theatre PDF
• American Moments, 1668-1973: Selected from Gifts to Williams College by J. Brooks Hoffman, M.D., Class of 1940
• Gunnar A. Kaldewey: Artist Books for a Global World (4 exhibitions)
• Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected by Robert P. Fordyce, Class of 1956 PDF
• The Haystack's Soil PDF
• Nature's Vast Frame: Natural Science and Poetry before Darwin and the "Origin of Species" PDF
• Lewis and Clark, the Louisiana Territory, and On to the Columbia
• Jack Kerouac and the Beats: Fifty Years of On the Road
• Omega Lives: The Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press PDF