Scheps

Sheldon Scheps Memorial Library is named after a graduate student in Anthropology, who died while in residence in the Department. Sheldon was well known on the Columbia campus and was enormously popular with staff, faculty and students. When he died his family provided funds to start a student library, and over the years faculty and alumni have donated many books and journals to this facility Scheps has two functions: as a reading room for graduate and undergraduate students and as the host for the Friday Seminar Series. Both are overseen by the faculty advisor, aided by work study students

Books

All the books are taxonomized geographically (Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Pacific Islands, the Subcontinent, Europe) and books under these categories comprise ethnographies of historical importance. These books are found on the shelves that flank the two seminar tables. On the reading stand are current periodicals, current reading packets, and very old books (mainly ethnographies and travelogues up to the 1930s). On the back shelves are the following categories: History of anthropology, Theory, Gender and Feminism, Religion and Magic, Race, Paradigms, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis, Mass Media and Performance Theory, Theory of War and Resistance Movements. 

The Sheldon Scheps Memorial Library at the Anthropology Department
Room 457 Schermerhorn Extension