Radcliffe Camera

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The Radcliffe Camera (colloquially known as the "Rad Cam" or "The Camera"; from Latin camera, meaning 'chamber') is a building of the University of Oxford, England, designed by James Gibbs in a Baroque style and built in 1737–49 to house a library, ultimately becoming a reading room of the Bodleian Library, not open to the public, after the original library moved out. It is sited to the south of the Old Bodleian, north of the Church of St Mary the Virgin, and between Brasenose College to the west and All Souls College to the east. The Radcliffe Camera's circularity, its position in the heart of Oxford, and its separation from other buildings make it the focal point of the University of Oxford, and as such it is almost always included in shorthand visual representations of the university. The library's construction and maintenance was funded from the estate of John Radcliffe, a physician who left £40,000 upon his death in 1714; the library was not ready to open until 1749. Until 1810, the library housed books covering a wide range of subjects, but under George Williams it was brought up to date from a state of neglect, and focus narrowed to the sciences, although by 1850 the Radcliffe Library still lagged behind the Bodleian. At this point librarian Henry Wentworth Acland arranged for the Radcliffe Library building to merge with the university, and the library's collection to be moved, ultimately to the newly constructed Radcliffe Science Library, a legal deposit member of the Bodleian Libraries; the building became known as the Radcliffe Camera, and used as a reading room for the Bodleian, to which it is connected by a tunnel, and an underground book store.