November 23, 2009

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About the Coale Collection

The Ansley J. Coale Population Research Collection in the Donald E. Stokes Library is one of the oldest demography libraries in the world. Founded over 40 years ago as a specialized research library for the Office of Population Research, it is now a special library in the Princeton University Library system. The collection is located on the lower level of Wallace Hall and is open to the public.

The Coale Collection was dedicated on June 25, 2002 in a ceremony attended by Ansley J. Coale and members of his family. We have a nice set of pictures from the occasion.

The collection is considered to be the premier collection of demographic material in the country. It contains more than 40,000 bound volumes, as well as over 15,000 reprints, technical reports, manuscripts, and working and discussion papers. Sixty percent of the collection consists of international statistical material (censuses and vital statistics). It also includes international censuses through 2005 on over 4,000 reels of microfilm. This interdisciplinary collection covers many fields in demography including formal demography (fertility, mortality and migration), population policy, family planning, epidemiology, child and public health, and family issues.

An extensive collection of material from the World Fertility Survey and the Demographic and Health Surveys is also available. Many electronic resources are available to students, faculty and researchers including Popline, Population Index, Sociological Abstracts, Medline, Social Explorer, ISI Web of Science, EconLit, the Cochrane Library and Public Affairs Information Service. The journal collection, which numbers approximately 300 domestic and international titles, is increasingly being made available electronically.

The library is a member of the Association of Population/Family Planning Libraries and Information Centers – International (APLIC), a world-wide network of population, demography and family planning libraries. Interlibrary loan from the collections of other academic institutions, non-governmental and international organizations, nonprofit agencies and consulting firms is available to the Princeton University community through the library’s membership in this organization.