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During a flood alert, the decision to evacuate a threatened collection of a library is an important one. If not thought out carefully, a hastily executed move can expose valuable collections to unforeseen threats. Although floods are usually slow to develop in Paris, the decision to make a preventive evacuation must be taken at the appropriate moment, considering the time needed for the relocation, the reality of the threat and the need for service continuity. In the context of its flood protection plan, the National Library of France has conceived a box model that contributes to saving time in case of a flood and prevents damage during an evacuation. Combining accessibility to documents with security requirements, this model can be implemented in different contexts.

As part of a themed print issue of Notes and Records dedicated to a research project surrounding the eighteenth-century Taylor White collection of animal paintings, this article provides context by describing the initial acquisition of the collection, and by situating it within the larger Blacker Wood Natural History Collection held at McGill University Library. Highlights of the Blacker Wood Collection are discussed, along with the collection's founder, Dr Casey Wood. The second part of the article provides a brief examination of the movement, in some academic administrative circles, towards the ‘de-professionalization’ of librarian work within academic libraries, and offers an outline of the specialized skills that librarians bring to the description, analysis and preservation of special collections. The Taylor White Project is then offered as an example of research collaborations between scholars and librarians; a description of the advantages of embedding a scholar within specific library collections to work with, rather than replace, a librarian is provided. The author suggests this strategy as one potential answer to the question of ‘de-professionalization’, to move away from divisive discussions towards a more symbiotic relationship between scholars and librarians.

When the world began to take notice of the growing risks of COVID-19 in early spring 2020, the University of South Florida Libraries–Tampa Special Collections shifted to virtual instruction sessions to provide students with access to rare books and primary-source archival materials. To respond to the need for a quick shift to online instruction, the department formulated a plan to support students with an open-access digital learning experience using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Building on critical digital pedagogy and feminist digital humanities, the sessions provided online teaching resources for faculty who could not schedule students for physical visits. Over the first year of remote work, the department created sessions for 15 course sections. Looking to the future, Special Collections will continue providing the option of virtual sessions as part of its instruction. The digital nature of the courses lends to a recursive pedagogy, allowing for continued adaptation that is complimentary to academic cycles.

At a time when space in any academic library is at a premium, when we sometimes need to argue for shelf space rather than computers and group work pods, the University of Sydney Library has decided not only to keep and maintain its nineteenth century printing press, but to feature it through a printer in residence program.Now in its third year, the program brings together a printmaker and a letterpress for eight weeks during semester. The intent is to engage with the library and its users, to bring the print workshop to life, to draw inspiration from the library's collection and to create a publication for the Artists’ Book Collection within Rare Books & Special Collections.In an era of instant layout, digital word processing and electronic publishing what does the slow and laborious process of letterpress printing bring to a twenty-first century academic library? This residency demonstrates that understanding the process of making a publication can be just as vital and alive as the content of that publication - one letter at a time.

While access to library and archival collections in mainland China remains unclear due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and increasing government scrutiny, past experiences in Chinese archives are still relevant for scholars going forward, in the event that the People’s Republic of China reopens the doors to these collections. In surveying the digital, print publication, and manuscript collections pertaining to the Chinese history of World War ii, this article shows how access to new kinds of sources redefined the pre-pandemic state of the field. In particular, curated volumes that emphasized perspectives from the Chinese Communist Party and leftist intellectuals gradually have given way to a more representative collection of the documentary evidence, and Taiwanese collections continue to be important to the historiography. The article begins with coverage of well-known guides and published catalogues of mainland and Taiwanese collections. It then covers some military documents that Chinese scholars occasionally have referenced. It emphasizes the richness of accessible material on the social and cultural history of the war era as part of a call to colleagues and future students to expand the scope of what is traditionally thought to be “military history.” There is ample opportunity for major interventions into our understanding of wartime China, which shaped the course of modern history overall, and major innovations in historiography that scholars usually make from the dusty reading rooms of the libraries and archives.

Cataloguing has lost status over the years, particularly the cataloguing of machine-press books in a standard library setting. This information-in-practice article redresses the view that catalogui...

Into the Light, a recently mounted co-curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th century “race betterment” pedagogies taught in Ontario’s post-secondary institutions that targeted some groups of people, including Anishinaabe, Black, and other racialized populations, and disabled and poor people, with dehumanizing ideas and practices. This article advances understandings of the transformative potential of centralizing marginalized stories in accessible and creative ways to disrupt, counter, and draw critical attention to the brutal impacts of oppressive knowledge. The “counter-exhibition” prioritized stories of groups unevenly targeted by such oppression to contest and defy singular narratives circulating in institutional knowledge systems of what it means to be human. The authors draw on feminist decolonial and disability scholarship to analyze the exhibition’s curation for the ways it collectively and creatively 1) brought the past to the present through materializing history and memory in ways that challenged archival silences; and 2) engaged community collaboration using accessible, multi-sensory, multi-media storytelling to “speak the hard truths of colonialism” (Lonetree, 2012, p.6) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia, 2013). The authors show how the exhibition used several elements, including counter-stories, to end legacies of colonial eugenic violence and to proliferate accounts that build solidarity across differences implicated in and impacted by uneven power (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012). Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario was co-curated by Elder Mona Stonefish, Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Evadne Kelly, Seika Boye, and Sky Stonefish. The accessible curated exhibition was generously supported by Dr. Carla Rice, Canada Research Chair and Director of Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph (UG) through her Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant that she co-directs with Dr. Eliza Chandler, and Dawn Owen at the Guelph Civic Museum. Thank you to the Re•Vision and BIT teams, Tracy Tidgwell, Ingrid Mündel, Kayla Besse, Lindsay Fisher, Lilith Lee, and Hannah Fowlie. Partner organizations and individuals, who made significant contributions to the exhibition, include Respecting Rights and Co-ordinator Sue Hutton; ARCH Disability Law Centre’s Mariana Versiani, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, and Robert Lattanzio, Executive Director; Aaron Kelly, Simon Lynch, and Madelaine Ius from Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University, who supported key elements of the exhibition production and design; voice actors Dante Jemmott, Reid Miller, Davinder Malhi, Russel Blower, and Matthew Rossi; public health researcher Franklin White, who provided notes on the scientific fallacies of eugenics; Archives and Special Collections, UG, in particular Kathryn Harvey and Gillian Manford, for their research support; Athol Gow, Library Accessibility Services, UG, for his accessibility support; and Sean Lee, Tangled Art + Disability, and Ash McAskill, Re•Vision Postdoctoral Fellow, for their support with the audio guide. 2023-02-19

As national leaders in infectious disease outbreaks, the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and its hospital partner Nebraska Medicine monitored and treated COVID-19 patients, starting with evacuees from Wuhan, China in February 2020. To document UNMC’s institutional response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and future outbreaks or pandemics, UNMC’s McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives (SCA) Department faculty quickly established an archival collecting strategy to create a broad documentation package with multiple collecting phases. The initial phase included a contemporaneous response for digital collecting, timeline creation, and community collecting, followed by later collecting of personal papers, artifacts, and oral histories from key players who are also front-line workers. The combined collecting approach ensured early digital content preservation, captured public momentum, and provided the structure for longer-term collecting, after time for healing and relationship-building with prospective donors.

Over the last several decades, Archives & Special Collections at the University of Mississippi has worked on exhibitions with several regional and on-campus partners. These types of collaborations between libraries, archives, museums, and others provide important insight into the need for such joint projects, especially in an era of tighter budgets, smaller staff sizes, technological advancements, and evolving user expectations. This article describes a selection of these endeavors and a compilation of benefits as well as lessons learned that are derived from the department’s experience and a more formal solicitation of assessment from partners.

This article describes the unfolding idea of the literary archival collection through the early history of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo (UB). The influence of founder...

A growing body of literature has developed around critical archival instruction and archivists as educators. This development demonstrates the pedagogical evolution beyond show-and-tell sessions to critical approaches in archival instruction and specific standards in archival literacy. This article provides a cross-disciplinary discussion of an approach to archival instruction. Also included is a reimagined instruction session using a fragmentary collection from the Saint-Domingue/Haiti colonial administration. Stories of the enslaved are usually marked by death and brutality. But Haiti's is a story of triumph; though fleeting, a victory nonetheless. When instructors decolonize archival instruction, they bring the past into the present and the future. The Haitian Revolution was a large-scale revolt by enslaved Africans, and it was also directly connected to the expansion of the United States. Archival instructors should encourage students to reimagine the stories told from the Saint-Domingue colonial administration collection and from any colonial collections that may be under their care.

This article discusses the illustrative material found within the Paris Commune Collection held in the Special Collections of The University of Sussex, and focuses on how values and opinions were communicated through the use of sartorial cartoons and caricatures. Approaches from a range of disciplines including art, librarianship, archives and education have been employed, highlighting the value of cartoons as both pieces of art and valuable communication devices, alongside the importance of the collection for teaching, and wider importance of using archive material within teaching.

University student newspapers have a long history across Australian university campuses of engaging with contemporary social and political issues, often reflecting a sentiment not represented in ma...

peer-reviewed The Special Collections and Archives Department (SpecColl) was established in the Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick (UL) in 1998. It is passionate about embedding its broad range of holdings in the university curriculum. Over the past twenty years, SpecColl has implemented an educational programme, building a network of longstanding academic contacts within the university, offering research assistance, and delivering a series of workshops catered to a variety of different student types across a broad range of disciplines. This article explores the growing educational focus of SpecColl in recent years, both in response to, and in anticipation of, the needs of faculty and students. The main body examines how SpecColl has developed its educational outreach initiatives to enhance teaching and learning at UL in line with key findings from its user statistics and student feedback. It explores the challenges faced by a specialised department in striving towards ubiquity on campus, and shares some of the lessons it has learned in its mission to make access to ‘special’ collections and archives a more ‘ordinary’ experience. The article concludes by imagining the future landscape of SpecColl, making a set of recommendations for the further development of educational activities at the department.

Housed in the Charles Talbut Onions Archive within the Cadbury Research Library (Special Collections) at the University Birmingham are twelve unpublished letters from C.S. Lewis to his friend and colleague Charles T. Onions, one of Oxford's most renowned etymologists and long-time editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The letters, about a third of which are dated, seem to have been composed between 1929 and the 1950's. Their bulk is given to Lewis's work on medieval literature, offering new insights into his reading, particularly of Milton and Aquinas. The correspondence is published her for the first time, accompanied by approximate datings of undated material (by Lewis handwriting expert Charlie W. Starr) and brief commentaries offering content analysis, textual and historical context, and indications for future research.

This article considers the pedagogical practice of the Special Collections staff team at the University of Sussex and the impact of the group visit experience on student learning. It addresses our current group visit teaching offer to students at the University of Sussex and our move to a more student-led active learning approach. It considers the use of the ‘pedagogical toolkit’ including technology within the classroom, and the creation of a document identification form to encourage critical thinking. Our aim for any group visit is to provide a positive first experience and get students enthused about using archives. In 2017 we undertook our own impact study, detailed within the article, to follow the student journey with the intention of finding out if students returned to use archives for their studies as a result of their group visit. Moving forward, this article considers our future activities in response to the impact study and institutional initiatives.

Review of: Kids of the Black Hole: The First Two Decades of Punk in Orange County, Chapman University in Orange Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives, Orange, California, 12 September 2018‐18 December 2019

Purpose The access to the rare originals of the early Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines remains problematic. The reference librarians often are restricted to directing the students and scholars to the secondary resources that are available both in print and as a part of the digital assets within the North American academic libraries. This paper aims to focus on the select primary source editions including select Spanish language colonial imprints that are available electronically on the Web along the Open Access. These Web-based resources serve as the reference tools for the early history of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. As many of these publications are rare and extremely expensive for most libraries, the Open Access resources serve as an aid to building a virtual collection of these items. Design/methodology/approach The author had to create a data set of the early imprints of the Spanish Philippines using several bibliographic resources. The data set will be submitted as an Appendix for this research paper. The author did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data set along with the voyant-based digital humanities approach for topic modeling. Findings The goals of this paper were to not only survey the early Spanish printing of the Philippines but also provide the reader with a somewhat complete picture of how the printing began in the Spanish Philippines, what kind of the first books were printed and how one can access them given their rarity and fragility. The collection building paradigms are undergoing significant shifts, and the focus of many academic libraries is shifting toward providing access to these items. As these items high-value low-use items continue to be part of the Special Collections, the access to these is problematic. The virtual collections thus serve as a viable alternative that enables further research and access. While the creators of these works are long gone, the legacy of the Spanish colonial domination, printing and the religious orders in the Philippines remain alive through these works. Research limitations/implications As this is an introductory paper, the author focused on the critical editions rather than providing a comprehensive bibliographic landscape of the presses that produced these editions. He also did not take into consideration many pamphlets that were published in the same period. He also did not consider the Chinese language publications of the Islands. The Chinese had been block printing since medieval times (Little, 1996). In the context of the Spanish Philippines, the Chinese migration and trade have been studied in detail by Chia (2006), Bjork (1998) and Gebhardt (2017). The scope of this paper also was centered toward building a virtual collection of these rare books. Practical implications Rare books are often expensive and out-of-reach for many libraries; the virtual collection of the same along the Open Access model represents an alternative to collect and curate these collections. The stewardship of these collections also acquires a new meaning in the digital milieu. Social implications This research paper will allow scholars to see past the analog editions and help them focus on curating a virtual collection. The questions of electronic access are often ignored when it comes to visiting and using them in a controlled environment of the reading room in the Special Collections. The author argues that one way to enable access to these rare and expensive books is to provide access to their digital counterparts. These digital/virtual surrogates of the originals will facilitate further research. Originality/value The author could not find similar research on the publications of the early Spanish colony of the Philippines.

2020 Vision! ChemMedChem Editor David Peralta looks back at the journal's activities in 2019, as well as upcoming Special Collections, features, and developments for ChemPubSoc Europe in 2020. He also introduces the journal's new Editorial and International Advisory Board members.

This essay explores four scrapbooks produced by the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch between 1927 and 1936 that are now part of the Getty Research Institute special collections. The scrapb...

In the fall of 2018, I was asked to calculate the value of Grand Valley State University’s (GVSU) general collection (defined as everything except Special Collections and University Archives) as part of risk mitigation planning and updating insurance coverage. Records indicated that our collection’s value was last calculated 11 years earlier, and we lacked both written documentation and institutional memory regarding the process used to calculate that value. While there is a fairly significant body of knowledge around calculating the value of monographs, I struggled to find guidance on calculating the monetary value FDLP collections. There is a robust body of scholarship on promoting the intrinsic value of being a member of the FDLP to library administration and other stakeholders, but very few of them focus on detailed financial benefits of tangible collections.

Book Review

Recent global events have underscored the need for broad access to digitized library special collections. At the same time, a burgeoning field of scientific and historical inquiry is finding a goldmine of data in the physical old books and manuscripts stored for centuries on library shelves. This article gives an overview of some of the interesting studies employing library materials in the new field of biocodicology, which expands the field of codicology (learning about book history through studying a copy’s physical attributes, sometimes referred to as “archaeology of the book”) to interrogate physical books with proteomic, genomic, and microbiomic tools. Historical health sciences collections provide rich, new research avenues for budding biocodicologists, and biocodicology and other interdisciplinary fields focused on material culture present an unforeseen justification for institutions’ continued preservation and access to individual physical copies.

Special collections of religious and theological materials have been part of the landscape of academic libraries in North America from their beginnings. This collection of ten articles treats several aspects of this rich history in three sections: the first deals with the history of specific collections at four libraries; the second treats current attempts to use special collections in teaching and the outreach mission of the library, including the development and use of digital technologies; and the third explores topics related to building library collections for the future, noting both pitfalls to be avoided and intriguing opportunities.

This article discusses in detail the content of the collection The Zygmunt Haupt Papers, 1907–1976, held in Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries. In particular, it describes the Voi...

While web archiving techniques capture snapshots of websites in real time, this article introduces an approach for building special collections for web archiving in retrospect. Retrospective web ar...

During the first half of the twentieth century, the mining industry in Britain was subject to recurrent disputes about the risk to miners’ lungs from coal dust, moderated by governmental, industrial, medical and mining bodies. In this environment, precise measurements offered a way to present uncontested objective knowledge. By accessing primary source material from the National Archives, the South Wales Miners Library and the University of Bristol's Special Collections, I demonstrate the importance that the British Medical Research Council (MRC) attached to standardized instrumental measures as proof of objectivity, and explore the conflict between objective and subjective measures of health. Examination of the MRC's use of spirometry in their investigation of pneumoconiosis (miner's lung) from 1936 to 1945 will shed light on this conflict and illuminate the politics inherent in attempts to quantify disability and categorize standards of health.

In recent years we have noticed a substantial increase in interest in our archive collections at the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. With circulation figures for print publications generally reported to be on a downward trend for libraries, unique material is being eagerly sought out.Who are our new audiences and how do they engage with archives in varying ways? What specific approaches have contributed to achieving this positive shift? Including observations from other research librarians and archivists, this article provides a view of art archive use and users, as well as the mechanisms that are proving successful. Our aim is to increase the visibility of our special collections to facilitate the unlocking of their powerful potential for the understanding and, sometimes, making of art.

The National Gallery of Australia Research Library and Archives (NGARL&A) offers unique collections and provides vital services within the contemporary Australian art world, but there has been a seismic shift in their users and use. This paper will explore the impact this change has had on our roles as art archivists and provide insight into new ways these collections are being used.

Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) library was fundamental to his historical work and he could not have written his great history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1778) without it. His library continues to attract interest and attention, and two documents held in Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library and Archives, not previously known to scholars, provide new information about the books that Gibbon owned. These are an invoice from his London bookbinder, Joseph Hall, for 1773–1776, andan invoice from his Lausanne bookseller, Jules Henri Pott, for 1793. The article provides transcriptions of these two documents, examines their contents, and discusses their importance for our understandingof Gibbon’s library.

The author addresses key questions that librarians, archivists, curators and administrators face when producing physical exhibitions in special collections, rare book libraries and archives. The author’s direct experience is complemented by data gathered through a pilot study she conducted in 2017 and is placed in the context of professional literature. The questions discussed focus mostly on physical exhibitions. While the context of this article is North American, the questions are also relevant to institutions in other countries. This article is especially of interest to new professionals, as an introduction to exhibition work, as well as to experienced professionals who want to reflect on their practices in comparison to those of other institutions.

The document presented and transcribed here, which is archived at the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, is the first in a series of letters sent by New Jersey Loyalist Bernardus LaGrange (1721-1797) from England to his former minister, the Anglican Reverend Abraham Beach (1740-1828) of Christ Church, New Brunswick, New Jersey in America. The correspondence in this collection continues with later letters from LaGrange’s son to the minister in 1810/1811 showing that the ties were maintained for a long time.

The Ordnance Survey of Ireland, carried out in the early-nineteenth century, was not just the process of mapping and collecting place names for translation as it is frequently depicted. The director of the Ordnance Survey, Sir Thomas Colby, decided to also use the Survey to carry out statistical, antiquarian, and geological surveys. The results of this trigonometrical survey include the so-called Ordnance Survey Memoirs and the Ordnance Survey Letters. Both sources provide valuable information about life in Ireland in the 1830s and early 1840s. Focusing in particular on the province of Connacht, this article argues that the Ordnance Survey Letters should be considered an important source of information about folklore and folk beliefs which were still extant or had been until shortly before the Survey visited the locality. This essay examines how, in a period of change and decline, the Ordnance Survey wrote local cultural heritage and identity onto the landscape. n earlier version of this paper was presented at the Island Dynamics conference on ‘Folk Belief’ & ‘The Supernatural in Literature and Film’ in Svalbard in 2017 and I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference for their feedback and suggestions. I would like to express my gratitude to Lillis Ó Laoire, the staff of Special Collections at the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway, and to the anonymous peer-reviewers for their help and suggestions. peer-reviewed 2020-10-03

This thesis takes an object-based approach to the amateur snapshot through an in-depth examination of the deckle edge, a form of snapshot presentation popular in the mid-twentieth century. Research draws primarily from a sample of 321 dated deckle edge snapshots in the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict, Toronto, and from Kodak trade periodicals held by Ryerson University Special Collections. The thesis examines the formerly undelineated dates of the deckle edge snapshot’s popularity, the various devices used to create the deckle edge, the multiplicities of edge variation blanketed under the term “deckle edge,” the appearance of the deckle edge in Kodak advertising, and the routes by which the deckle edge came to the snapshot. By situating the deckle edge snapshot in these contexts, the thesis demonstrates the value of approaching snapshots as dynamic, physical objects, and the kinds of information that can be derived from their non-image areas.

This dataset contains bibliographic data of publications containing scholarly editions in any language of cuneiform tablets in small collections of cuneiform objects (typically 5–20 objects) in United States colleges and universities, current through 2020. These collections include a variety of ancient text forms, including but not limited to economic documents, letters, cylinder seals, and large reliefs. The dataset is stored on the JOHD Dataverse Repository. The data was compiled as part of a larger project to map the collections of cuneiform in the United States for the purposes of increasing access. Reuse potential includes its use as a reference tool for the history of Assyriology, for producing scholarship around the objects in these collections, for historical bibliometric data, and for the reconstruction of ancient cuneiform corpora throughout the United States.

Switzerland was one of the hotspots of the Russian political emigration in the years immediately before the revolution of 1905, with Geneva being one of the main centers of Russian emigre printing in the first years of the 20th century. Many of these imprints are now accessible in a digital collection on the Swiss platform e-rara.ch. These works originate from several special collections of the Schweizerische Osteuropabibliothek (Swiss Library of Eastern Europe) in Bern. Of special interest is the 'Davos Russian library’, a Russian-language library from the beginning of the 20th century whose holdings offer insights into the reading interests and activities of Russians in Switzerland before the October Revolution.

Collecting and preserving e-books in special collections institutions poses challenges and rewards for working professionals in the field. Although scholars of book history have spent the last decade or so including e-books in their historical overviews, reviewing e-books’ connections to their physical past and speculating on their impact on the future of books, their importance in the overall timeline of book evolution has not yet made an impact on collecting guidelines. Institutions do not seem overly eager to be the first to create a permanent collection of e-books—and there may be just cause for reluctance. Not only do e-book files come with the same long-term preservation problems as any born-digital materials, they also have added complications such as a lack of standardized file format, a lack of permanence in licensing agreements, and the constant threat of content changes, just to name a few. While this paper aims to persuade special collections libraries to begin collecting e-books, it also lays out the complications standing in the way of a successful e-book collection. It starts a conversation around possible solutions for long-term preservation and patron-use challenges for e-books in special collections.

This chapter explores how digital technologies have disrupted practices of circulation of marginal annotations of physical books within readerships. Despite increased uptake of digitised books in special collections, ease of access to marginal annotations has not increased, and those that are accessible to scholars are often heavily curated examples, or random happenstances within pre-defined sets. Potential reasons why access to marginalia is presently limited, and how users access and engage with digitised marginalia in online environments are also examined, alongside the ways in which access can be improved with inclusive considerations, such as open-access databases, and other emergent technologies. Ultimately, access to digital marginalia has become commodified in ways not previously experienced by reading audiences, and technologies currently available to us may enable increased access and usability to digitised historical materials, such as marginalia, for audiences now and into the future.