s Library in 1971 and the reading room was converted into a periodical browsing room.
Smaller reading rooms are housed in the tower and are accessible to library affiliates. These include reading rooms for the library's area studies holdings, including African, East Asian, Latin American, Near East, Slavic and East European, Southeast Asian, and Judaica collections. There are also dedicated reading rooms for several fields of study, including American Studies, History, and Philosophy.
Sterling's northern wing, accessed from the nave via a cloister hallway, contains the library's offices as well as three major rooms: a lecture hall, the Memorabilia Room, and the Rare Book Room. The Memorabilia Room hosts temporary exhibitions of Yale's archival collections and university history, and serves as an antechamber to the 120-seat lecture hall.
The Rare Book Room, designed after English Jacobean architecture, was built to allow library patrons to browse Yale's collection of rare books and manuscripts. A vaulted, octagonal chapel behind the room was specially constructed to house a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The completion of the Beinecke Library in 1963 provided a more secure, climate-controlled repository for rare books, and the room and chapel now serve as a browsing room for the library's Manuscripts & Archives department.
The library originally had two courtyards designed and landscaped by Beatrix Farrand. In 1997, the western courtyard was enclosed and renovated to become the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Sterling's remaining courtyard, named the Selin Courtyard, features motifs from the history of printing.
The library is one of the most elaborate buildings on the Yale campus. Rogers commissioned artisans, including stained glass artist G. Owen Bonawit and blacksmith Samuel Yellin, who worked with Rogers on many of his buildings, sculptor René Paul Chambellan, and painter Eugene Savage. The building's exterior is decorated with stone gargoyles, reliefs, and inscriptions. The nave is the most ornately decorated library interior, although ornamental features, particularly stained-glass windows, can be found in nearly every room in the building.
A relief above the library's main entrance symbolizes the scholarly achievements of ancient civilizations. It is the work of architectural sculptor René Paul Chambellan, who executed a design produced by Lee Lawrie.:282 The scene depicts Cro-Magnon, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hebrew, Arab, Greek, Mayan, and Chinese scholars in low relief, with inscriptions from major works in each writing system. At center is a medieval scholar, and directly above the doors are symbolic representations of major civilizations, which include a Phoenician ship, a Babylonian lamassu and the Capitoline wolf of Rome.
Alma Mater mural
At the western end of the nave is a fresco painted by Eugene Savage, a professor in the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Savage titled it "The Imagination that Directs the University's Spiritual and Intellectual Efforts," but it is commonly known as the Alma Mater mural for its depiction of a personified "University." Savage, an expert in Early Renaissance techniques, painted the mural in his characteristic style, an Art Deco interpretation of traditional Renaissance composition. Surrounding "Alma Mater" are personifications of academic disciplines.
680 unique stained glass panels by G. Owen Bonawit adorn the nave, reading rooms, offices, and tower of the library. Eighty decorate the nave, depicting scenes from the history of Yale and New Haven. Most reading rooms have stained glass panels that represent themes from their subject matter. Bonawit's firm also designed over 2,000 small outline images to inset in windows without stained glass panes. Although Sterling contains the most in number, Bonawit's panels can be found in many of Yale's Gothic Revival buildings of the same period, including the Sterling Law Building, the Hall of Graduate Studies, and the residential colleges.
Other notable ornament
In the nave, ten high relief stone panels by Chambellan depict the history o