Cubberley Education Library

Broad coverage of education is offered in a collection of over 170,000 volumes. Current subscriptions to journals and other serials number over 1200. In addition, Cubberley offers access to myriad electronic resources, including articles, books, reports, government documents, and data. We have the ERIC documents, college catalogs, and Kraus Curriculum resources (in each case older ones are on microfiche & newer ones on the Web.) We have a small but growing curriculum collection, plus historical collections of textbooks and college catalogs in paper format. Doctoral dissertations for the School of Education are shelved in Cubberley, with those from 1989+ also available online for downloading by the Stanford community.

Cubberley Library began in 1891 as a departmental library housing some 600 college catalogs and school reports. This early collection occupied a single room in the Inner Quad. Expansion began in 1898 when Ellwood Patterson Cubberley came to Stanford as Executive Head of the Education Department and immediately focused his attention on the library. By 1903 the small collection had grown to some 3,000 volumes, occupied more commodious quarters, and was overseen by a part-time student librarian.

In 1917 Cubberley was named the first Dean of the newly established School of Education. The development of the library and its collection continued to interest him. After two changes in location, the library moved to the Education Building in 1938. This building, planned by Cubberley after his retirement in 1933 and financed largely from his personal fortune, opened in 1938. A large section of the second floor, consisting of three interconnecting rooms, was designed for the library. The scope of the Cubberley Library collections has vastly expanded since those early days. Originally designed to support teacher training, the collection has grown considerably to support the broader research and teaching interests of the SUSE faculty in the social science disciplines.