Introduction

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is considered an institution that promotes public education and academic research in the arts and sciences fields of study. Henry E. Huntington's vision was to provide an independent collection-based research library that would serve all communities, the entire country and the world in a unique way. In the early 1900s, scholars could view the library's resources for free, but the public was not admitted into the library as freely as they can today. Today, the Huntington is considered to be one of the largest independent research libraries, and a major center for humanistic scholarship and learning in the United States. The library promotes research in three differnt areas: literature, art and science.The botanical gardens reinforce Huntington's educational mission, as well. Just as Huntington collected books, and art objects, he too, collected rare and endangered plants. The plants aspect of the institution allows people to understand science and landscape traditions. The art collection offers educational opportunities to learn about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through art paintings, sculptures, photographs, and furniture, which will help encourage learning for students of all ages. Therefore, today, the facility is not only for scholars conducting advanced research but for everyday people, who want to learn more, just as Huntington did. The purpose of the Huntington library is to work with universities, colleges, school districts, and teachers to help strengthen educational activities.In Huntington's 1925 revision to the deed of trust, he states that "the object of the instritution is the advancement of learning [in] the arts and sciences...to render the books, manuscripts, and other contents avaliable...to scholars and other persons engaged in research or creative work in histoty, literature, art, science, and kindered subjects...and to prosecute and encourage study and research in original souces" (Bernal, p.15-16).  Huntington is the founder of the library who believed that, after his death, his library would be a research facility for students.