Curricular Support
The Claremont Colleges Library (TCCL)
The Claremont Colleges Library partners with The Claremont Colleges to support research, teaching, and learning. Librarians and library staff offer in-person research appointments and also respond to questions via email and instant messaging. One of the major services provided by librarians is teaching students how to find, critically evaluate, and effectively use information. Customized information literacy instruction sessions can be requested for one or more class periods. These hands-on active learning sessions can be held in one of the Library’s flexible classrooms or in the classroom on the home campus.
The Library provides a variety of study and collaboration spaces, including reservable group study rooms, designated quiet areas, a media viewing room, and a cafe. Desktop computers and Wi-Fi allow students and faculty to access online resources throughout the building.
The Library’s holdings include over 2.7 million print and electronic titles which are available to all members of the academic community, from on or off campus. Through the Library’s website, Pomona students, faculty and staff can access Library Search—it serves as both a local library catalog and also provides access to worldwide library holdings. In addition, the Library provides access to hundreds of article databases, including platforms such as Web of Science, JSTOR, and ProQuest, and more than 130,000 e-journals, magazines, and newspapers. The Library also provides access to e-books, streaming videos, and digital primary source collections such as Early English Books Online and Colonial State Papers.
The Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL) provides access to a growing number of digitized collections from the Colleges, as well as from the Library’s Special Collections. Scholarship@Claremont, The Claremont Colleges institutional repository, provides access to scholarship produced by The Claremont Colleges faculty, students, and staff.
The Library is a depository for United States government publications, with a collection of historic documents dating back to the late 1700s and many recent publications are available online. The government publications collection also has extensive holdings issued by the State of California, the United Nations, other international agencies, and Great Britain. The Asian Library, housed on the 3rd floor of the library, has a collection of current materials as well as special collections and archives in Asian languages. In Special Collections, student can engage with materials from more than 1,000 years of human history—manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs, and other unique materials—in a wide variety of subjects including history, literature, the arts, science and technology, politics and government, and the history of The Claremont Colleges.
The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections brings together The Claremont Colleges’ most rare and unique library and information resources, all available for exploration and discovery. Our staff provides an array of research and instruction services to connect researchers to history through the collections. Special Collections stewards collections of rare books, historical and literary manuscripts, archives, photographs, maps, prints, and ephemera amounting to more than 150,000 volumes and 10,000 linear feet of papers that are available for research, teaching, and learning in the Special Collections reading room, and, increasingly, online in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. Highlights of Special Collections holdings include the Oxford Collection on Oxford University, the Bodman Renaissance Collection of Florentine Humanism, the Irving Wallace Archive, the H. Jerry Voorhis Congressional Papers, the David Dreier Congressional Papers, the Carruthers Aviation History Collection, the Herbert Hoover Collection on Mining and Metallurgy, the Boulé California Orange Collection, the Crispin Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, the Michael G. Wilson Collection of early printed books, and the McCutchan and Seymour collections of music history and performance. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature is well represented in several author collections that contain significant manuscript holdings. Other collection strengths include rare books, archives, and objects from China, Japan and Korea, incunabula, eighteenth century English imprints, history of science, California fine printing, voyages and travels, early maps and atlases, history of religion, Claremont and Pomona Valley history, and the history of The Claremont Colleges. Collections with Pomona College associations include the Philbrick Library of Dramatic Arts and Theatre History, the Westergaard Library on Scandinavian and Baltic history, the A.O. Woodford Geology Library, Gillingham Fore-edge Paintings, and several large collections of Western Americana and Californiana such as the William Smith Mason Collection and the Water Resources Collection. The Pomona College Archives bring together official publications, papers, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials that document the history of the College including the founding of the Claremont University Consortium; the Pomona College Archives feature papers of presidents, faculty members, departments, programs, events, and alumni. For more information, please see the Special Collections website.
The Library offers Resource Sharing (Interlibrary Loan) services and maintains partnerships which provide access to books, articles, and other materials not held in our collections. Affiliated libraries in Claremont include the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College and the library of the California Botanic Garden, which maintains a large botanical and horticultural collection.
Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations
The Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations at Pomona College was dedicated in 1966 and remains unique among language house models in terms of its centralized structure, size and the breadth of its campus programming. The Center’s composite identity of residence hall, dining hall, and hub for internationally minded instructional and co-curricular programs is rich and complex.
Approximately 129 sophomores, juniors and seniors typically live in Oldenborg, divided into six major language wings: Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. Depending on need, rooms may be made available for students demonstrating proficiency in other languages; recent examples include Korean, Arabic and Hindi-Urdu. Students apply to live in Oldenborg; the selection process is competitive and is based on demonstrated language proficiency and faculty recommendation. The six major language wings reflect the six language programs of Pomona College and are mentored by the Language Residents, native speakers of that section’s language. Language Residents are young professionals from abroad who hold either a B.A. or M.A. from an institution in their home country and show interest in a future teaching career. They are recruited, hired, and trained by Oldenborg and come to Pomona College as non-degree student Exchange Visitors with part-time instructional staff responsibilities. In many ways the Language Resident program constitutes the heart of Oldenborg: Language Residents teach stand-alone conversation classes for partial academic credit in lounges inside the Oldenborg residence; they serve as teaching assistants within their respective language departments; they mentor daily language tables in the Oldenborg dining hall; they coordinate or promote any number of activities—both on and off campus—that serve to promote the target language and culture to students both in and outside Oldenborg.
Oldenborg’s dining hall serves lunch and is open each day that classes are in session on the Pomona campus. It houses Oldenborg’s most visible programs: the daily foreign language tables and the Oldenborg Luncheon Colloquium (OLC). Anywhere from 150 to 300 students, faculty and staff from across The Claremont Colleges typically participate daily in these two programs. Tables in the six Pomona languages (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish) meet daily whereas others (Swedish, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Swahili, Persian, etc.) meet once or twice each week, depending on student interest. Language tables are mentored by Language Residents or other staff/faculty mentors and no English is permitted. Students are recognized each semester at the Holiday and Closing lunches for their table attendance; some go an entire semester without missing a single lunch at Oldenborg. The Oldenborg Luncheon Colloquium (OLC) runs concurrently with the language table program on the dining hall’s south side; each semester Oldenborg works with campus faculty to invite noted scholars, writers, artists and other professionals to speak on topics of international interest. Approximately 20-25 presentations take place each semester.
Oldenborg further supports language instruction on campus via the Foreign Language Resource Center (FLRC), housed in Mason Hall 101. The FLRC provides instructional language technology support and other services for language faculty. Faculty may reserve the computer area for their classes or special projects. Language tutoring takes place there several evenings each week, and the space also hosts language-oriented receptions and workshops.
Additionally, Oldenborg administers the Exchange Visitor Program (J visa) for the campus, offers elementary coursework for credit in Swahili and Persian (SILP program), and manages the Oldenborg International Research and Travel Grant, which allows rising seniors to undertake pre-thesis research abroad in the summer before their senior year.
Language houses are generally thought to be sites of language exclusivity and language immersion. Specific sites within the Oldenborg building, such as target language classrooms and the dining hall, honor these concepts. However, Oldenborg strives to make all interested parties feel welcome, and to rally campus partners in promoting the importance of the teaching and learning of foreign languages and international studies. Oldenborg reports to the Vice President and Dean of the College and is staffed by a director, assistant director, language instructional technologist, administrative assistant and the seven language residents.
Pacific Basin Institute
The Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College (PBI) is dedicated to promoting transdisciplinary inquiry into the peoples, cultures, and environments of the Pacific world. PBI’s programs and archive support teaching and learning around the notion of an interconnected Pacific comprising Asia, Oceania, North America, and South America. Founded in 1979 and moved to Pomona College in 1997 by the journalist, scholar, and Asia specialist Frank Gibney, PBI sponsors conferences, lectures, and research projects in a variety of subject areas related to the Pacific world. In addition, PBI maintains an archive of Pacific-related audiovisual, manuscript, and oral history collections. The archive’s holdings include the entire production library of the award-winning PBS documentary series The Pacific Century, the Frank Gibney papers, PBI-sponsored student documentaries, and PBI lecture videos. PBI’s services to the Pomona College and Claremont Colleges community include sponsored lecture series; the provision of films and documentaries for classroom use; a student internship program with Pacific Forum, a foreign policy research institute; assistance with primary source research; and oral history project development and support.
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