Excerpt:
When Max Adler founded the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum in 1930, he recognized the need to exhibit artifacts from the history of astronomy as well as to establish the first planetarium theater in America.
In addition to the Zeiss planetarium projector, he purchased a collection of about 500 astronomical, navigational, and mathematical instruments from A. W. M. Mensing in the Netherlands. These instruments formed the foundation of the Adler's History of Astronomy Collection, which has since grown to almost 2000 historic instruments. This makes it the largest collection of such material in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest and most important in the world.
In addition to housing these instruments, the History of Astronomy Department is home to a significant library of rare books, a collection of astronomically-themed works on paper, and a modern reference library and research center