Lindsay France/University Photography

David Corson, curator at Cornell's Kroch Library, helps to transport a replica of the HMS Beagle in the library's vault, Feb. 28.

Far below the Arts Quad, some of Cornell's richest treasures live in a massive, cold, locked room called simply "the vault."

Kroch Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) houses more than 400,000 rare books and 80 million manuscripts, and another million photographs, prints, artwork and other media. To ensure that these items are kept safe, the library stores them in a 14,000-square-foot underground, climate-controlled, high-security vault.

No one except RMC staff is allowed inside the vault -- but any Cornell scholar (or visiting researchers from anywhere in the world) can request to see most items in RMC's reading room.

The library's oldest items, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, date to 2250 B.C.E. Collections are organized by size, call number or subject, and they range from Dante to Wordsworth, from the history of science to human sexuality and from civil engineering to ornithology.

Lindsay France/University Photography

A Norwegian runic coin collection is one of the many treasures found in the Kroch Library vault.

Many items from Cornell's founders reside in the vault. For example, Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president, compiled items on the French Revolution and on European witchcraft. White wrote a seminal work on the subject, and University Archivist Elaine Engst explained that "he saw witchcraft as the irrational, as something you had to document and study to avoid the suffering caused by ignorance and bigotry."

Many of Ezra Cornell's own personal items are in the vault as well, including his ornately designed safe. The safe is so heavy that when it was moved into the newly built vault in 1992, staff worried it would be too heavy for the elevator. But, Engst noted with a smile, "it turned out to be just fine."

Lindsay France/University Photography

An official Palm Beach County Votomatic voting machine used in the 2000 election.

An eclectic group of items fills the safe, including 11th-century Danish and Norwegian runic coins, Brazilian semi-precious stones and two solid gold Nobel Prize medals. The medals recognize professors Peter Debye and James Sumner for their achievements in chemistry in 1936 and 1946, respectively.

In the center of the vault resides a shelf of busts, including plaster casts of Dante Alighieri and bronze busts of the Marquis de Lafayette, playwright George Bernard Shaw and Cornell professor Goldwin Smith. Across the aisle, four large volumes of John James Audubon's life-sized illustrations of North American birds lay on their sides, too large to be stored upright.

In another aisle, Engst pointed to a voting machine from Palm Beach County, Fla. She noted that it had been used in the contested 2000 presidential election and asked, "Have you ever wondered what a hanging chad looks like?" She explained that Stephen Hilgartner, professor of science, technology and society, purchased the machine for his course on voting technology.

"That's the point of why we have these things. Why do they matter? Because they're real … You can see a million pictures of the voting machine, but to look at the machine and actually hold one of those cards and say, 'That really is confusing' -- it's a very different kind of experience."

Erica Rhodin '12 is a student writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.