Fiber Science and Apparel Design Collection
Library Subject Collection
Overview
Collection Scope
Collection Context
Affiliations
Responsibility
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Overview
subject description and guidelines
The Libraries seek to support research, extension, and instruction in the areas of fiber science and apparel design. The major areas of scholarship emphasize apparel design and textiles as products and processes with meaning. This multidisciplinary approach builds on materials, design, biology, chemistry, engineering and social science concepts and methods.
constituencies
The collection is used by faculty, staff and students of the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design. Other constituencies include a variety of disciplines such as Nanotechnology, Biomedical Engineering, Anthropology, History, Art, Applied Physics, Ergonomics, and Materials Science. The associated Graduate Field of Fiber Science and Apparel encompasses all aspects of fiber science and apparel design research on Cornell’s Ithaca campus.
Collection Scope
collection strength
Overall, the collecting goal for Fiber Science and Apparel Design is to provide materials suitable for dissertation-level research and undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education. The following topics are collected at this research level: fiber science; textile chemistry; apparel design; apparel/textile management; history and design of textiles; history of apparel; lace.
For fiber science, North America, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea. For history of textiles and apparel or for lace, the scope is global. For history of textiles and apparel, ethnographic materials are of interest, with an emphasis on Turkey, India, Indonesia, Japan, China, Native America, and Latin America. For lace, there is an emphasis on Western Europe.
For fiber science, current. For history or textiles and apparel or for lace, all periods of history are included.
exclusions
The following areas are not collected: toy making, home crafts, quilting.
material types
Broadly, fiber science and apparel emphasize scholarly communication through academic and specialized journals. Scholarly, trade monographs and serials, textbooks and data sets are also collected. Exhibition catalogs for both textiles and costume are collected from major museums.
special collections or noteworthy resources in the field
Mann Library's Special Collections hold materials that are too rare, valuable or fragile to be housed in the regular stacks. An in-depth historical Lace Collection is housed in this area. ECommons serves as a repository for data files compiled by Cornell researchers.
