Cogswell, Joseph Green (1786-1871)

US librarian. In 1820 he was appointed librarian of Harvard Library and professor of geology there. He reclassified the Harvard Library on the same basis as the one in Göttingen, Germany, where he had spent some time studying. He was superintendent of the Astor Library in New York 1848-61.

He was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard (1806), he travelled on various merchant ventures. He helped establish the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1823, and edited the New York Review