Collectively, the Libraries’ collections form an
extended record of experience that is rich, varied, provocative and rewarding,
a living archive where objects and texts gain value by proximity and
context. In addition to long-acknowledged treasures – the Audubon “Double-Elephant” folio
Birds of America, the Phoenix book of hours, the four Shakespeare folios,
and John Jay’s manuscript of Federalist Number 5 – the curious
researcher can find at Columbia Renaissance playing cards, Chinese oracle
bones, nineteenth-century puppets, missionary archives, fragments of
the Iliad on papyrus, interviews with long-dead national leaders, and
photographs of Rasputin and the Romanovs at home. These live with archival
collections of tremendous depth. They inform one another, making possible
that discovery of unexpected relationships that may lead in turn to new
knowledge. Together, the holdings of the Special Collections Libraries
offer the students and faculty of the Columbia community those special
opportunities for teaching and learning that are the defining characteristic
of a great university.
Jewels in Her Crown: Treasures from the Special Collections of Columbia’s
Libraries celebrates the presence of these unique resources in
the city of New York and illustrates their amazing range of content.
Visitors to the metropolitan area and New Yorkers themselves often
have no idea of the existence of the collections at Columbia and even
alumni, after spending years on and around the campus, are frequently
astonished to learn of the range and diversity of the University’s
holdings. Despite a long history of research use, public exhibitions,
and now international exposure by means of the World Wide Web, the
special collections of the Libraries are sometimes viewed as buried
treasures, secret caches of rarities that are seldom shared. We hope
that Jewels in Her Crown will change this perception by refreshing
the memories of old friends and introducing to others the scope of
these research materials, and the pleasures of the mind and delights
to the senses that an academic library can provide.
The objects pictured in this catalog and on our institutional website
form, of course, only the proverbial tip of the bibliographic iceberg.
Each of them is intended to direct attention to the larger collections
of which they are a part. Following rather loosely the topical organization
used in a brief exhibition of Columbia Library treasures mounted in 1951
to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the College’s founding, Jewels
in Her Crown is designed less as a display of traditionally defined “treasures” (although
we know there are many of those) than as a map of territories that include
both well-known paths and unfamiliar by-ways. We hope that visitors to
the exhibition and readers of the catalogue will be moved to follow these
guideposts toward the individual libraries that have lent their works.
Shortly after the New York diarist George Templeton Strong matriculated
at Columbia College in 1835, he noted that in 1776 the library of his
new school had been ”the finest in the country.” Dispersed
by the invading British soldiers who reportedly burned books and sold
them for grog, the collections survived in part only because the Reverend
Charles Inglis, who was himself forced to flee the city a few months
later, hid somewhere between 300 and 800 volumes and some scientific
apparatuses in the steeple of St. Paul’s. They were discovered
by accident some thirty years later when workmen attempted to replace
an organ in the church and came upon the door to a locked closet.
Whether or not this steeple room can claim the honor of being the Library’s
first rare book vault is open to question, of course, since there is
no record of which volumes survived. The earliest gifts-in-kind to the
College Library had come from local ministers and lawyers and, perhaps
surprisingly, from Oxford University, which donated in 1772 thirty books
that had been published by the Clarendon Press. Although these might
today be identified as rare, at the time they comprised a working library
for the College students. Some of them, along with the libraries of Samuel
Johnson, the first President, and his son William Samuel Johnson, were
later re-acquired by the University, and are part of the Rare Book and
Manuscript collection of the Library.
In the decades following the establishment of Columbia College, the
library collections, like the school itself, grew very slowly and little
attention was paid to materials that were valuable for their own sake
unless they contributed directly to the education of the small and often
unruly student body. In fact, by the middle of the nineteenth century,
despite some interesting purchases and gifts from faculty, including
Professor of Italian Lorenzo Da Ponte and President Nathaniel Moore,
whose private library was rich in classical titles, the Columbia collections
had fallen well behind those of the other established educational institutions
in the Northeast. The resources available in other libraries in New York
were considered sufficient and students were at times actively discouraged
from even using the College books. Acquisition funds remained low for
decades. The first full-time librarian was not appointed until the 1830s
and the first printed catalogue not issued until 1874. In light of this,
it is perhaps remarkable that the college was one of the three United
States college or university purchasers of the great folio edition of
Audubon’s The Birds of America, still a cornerstone of the Libraries’ special
collections. Strong, who in 1842 records his visit to “Alma Mater” to
inspect the Audubon plates, complains in the 1860s from his perspective
as a member of the College Library Committee about the sparse funding
available for the purchase of rare and interesting books and the Committee’s
inability or unwillingness to spend money on the acquisition of distinguished
collections. (It is gratifying to note that Strong did donate many books
himself to the library, including what appears to have been the first
medieval manuscript in the collection, bound with an early 16th-century
printed breviary.)
The substantial library of Leander van Ess was purchased in 1838 by
the faculty of Union Theological Seminary (as of 2004 a member of the
Columbia Libraries community) and the John Jay library was donated by
the Jay family to the Law faculty in 1860, but the real development of
special collections at Columbia itself had to wait until the institution
began to take shape as a modern research university in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Although the College had depended on the largess
of donors to support its book collections since it accepted the library
of attorney Joseph Murray in 1758, the first major gift of books and
support for the Libraries came only in 1881 when Stephen Whitney Phoenix,
a member of the class of 1859, bequeathed both money and part of his
own impressive collection of rare materials. These included a Shakespeare
First Folio (1623), a Caxton printing of Christine de Pisan’s The
fayt of armes and of chyvalrye (1489), and manuscripts by Robert Fulton
and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with 7,000 additional titles. In the years
following the Phoenix bequest, special materials donated to the Library
included Persian, Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, classical texts and
early American documents, along with core works in a variety of disciplines
and a growing body of documents related to the history of Columbia.
The 1897 opening of Low Library on the new Morningside campus relieved
some of the crowding in the downtown stacks, giving more room for imaginative
collection development. The expanded programs of the University and its
growing reputation as a center for professional study with an international
constituency and faculty stimulated a period of rapid growth that encompassed
special materials as well as the general collections. The growth of the
American economy which resulted in the accumulation of private wealth
in the years surrounding the beginning of the twentieth century stimulated
both bibliophily and philanthropy, and although the University Librarians
George Hall Baker and James Canfield both actively discouraged the purchase
of books that required special care and were rarely used, such materials
were regularly added to the Libraries, both by donation and by the use
of restricted funds.
For example, even before the University moved uptown, Samuel Putnam
Avery and Mary Ogden Avery had endowed the Avery Library at Columbia,
a memorial to their son Henry, an architect who died young. From its
start, the Avery actively purchased rare and expensive volumes as part
of its mission to collect comprehensively in the areas of architecture,
archaeology, and the decorative arts. The Chinese collection, established
shortly after the founding of the Department of Chinese in 1901, was
greatly augmented by a gift of the 5,044 volume encyclopedia Tu shu ji
cheng from the Empress Dowager of China. In the same period, gifts of
the papers of Anton Seidl, an eminent conductor, and of significant first
editions and autograph letters by the composer Edward MacDowell, first
chair of the Department of Music, enriched the resources available for
the study of music performance and history. Whatever the official attitude
of the administration might have been, exhibitions of rare books in the
rotunda of Low Library – including a loan exhibition of the books
of J. P. Morgan – made it clear that there was an appreciative
audience for these materials at Columbia.
With some exceptions, the large collections in all fields from which
the majority of the items in this exhibition were drawn, however, were
not added until the 1920s and 1930s, when the expansion of the University’s
programs encouraged the rapid growth of the Libraries. The collections
of Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman (economics), David Eugene Smith (mathematics
and astronomy), George Arthur Plimpton (medieval and Renaissance manuscripts
and education), Brander Matthews (drama), Acton Griscom (Jeanne d’Arc),
Edward Epstean (photography), Park Benjamin (American literature), and
the American Type Founders Company (history of printing) all came to
the University in this period. The Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center
opened in 1928 giving new life to the historical collections gathered
by the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which included the libraries
of John Green Curtis and George Sumner Huntington. Equally significant
additions were made to the collections at Avery, the Law School, Barnard
(founded in 1889), the East Asian Library (now the C. V. Starr East Asian
Library), the Office of Art Properties, the Music Library (now the Gabe
M. Weiner Music & Arts Library), and the Union Theological Seminary.
The organization of a Friends of the Library group in 1928 by Mr. Plimpton
and Professor Smith lay behind many of these acquisitions, since the
Friends had taken upon themselves the task of building the resources
of the Libraries. Because the differentiation between the circulating
collections in day-to-day use by undergraduates and students in the professional
schools and those materials requiring special care if they were to survive
had become clear as a critical mass of the latter accumulated, new approaches
to the management of these collections were developed. In 1930, Columbia
became the first institution in the country to establish a separate Rare
Book Library (later renamed the Rare Book and Manuscript Library) with
a mission to collect and preserve early and rare materials. This Rare
Book Library, which moved from Schermerhorn to Low to the new South Hall
(eventually christened Butler Library), remained just one of the many
places where rare materials were pursued and acquired. A 1936 publication
of the Friends, Bibliotheca Columbiana, listed contributions to and purchases
of unique materials by the Mathematics Library, the Music Library, Avery,
and Columbiana; an earlier issue of the same publication had described
the Japanese collections, the Abbott collection of Sanskrit and Marathi
manuscripts, the Epstean collection of books on the history and science
of photography, and several others. Such riches supported a growing interest
at the University in the history of books, printing and the transmission
of texts. The development of this interdisciplinary field was supported
by the Friends, partly in response to the collecting interests and tireless
advocacy of the first Rare Book Library Curator, Helmut Lehmann-Haupt,
who had come to Columbia from the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. Lehmann-Haupt
encouraged the purchase of the distinguished library of the American
Type Founders Company, which still forms one of the unique strengths
of the Library collections.
After World War II, the special collections continued to receive gifts
and to buy materials as their budgets allowed. The manuscript collections
were enhanced by the addition of the papers of Gouverneur Morris, John
Jay and Herbert H. Lehman, among others; the Bakhmeteff Archive, developed
on campus in the 1950s but only formally added to the Libraries in the
early 1980s, brought over 1,000 collections from the Russian 8Emigr8E
community to the pool of research materials available for the study of
Russian and East European history and culture. The addition of publishing
archives and the archives of literary agents, initiated by the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library Director Kenneth Lohf, much enriched the field
for study that his predecessor Lehmann-Haupt had promoted five decades
earlier. Rare book collections given by members of the Friends of the
Library made first editions of important texts in all languages available
for study. The Oral History Research Office, founded in 1948, had by
the end of the 1990s created, transcribed and catalogued more than 1,700
hours of interviews.
Special Collections Libraries have as their special mission the preservation
of the material objects that have for five millennia transmitted knowledge
from one generation to the next. The exciting possibilities for new kinds
of access to fragile materials provided by the development of digital
tools make the existence of such libraries even more important perhaps
than they were in the past. The electronic enhancement of faded writing,
and the ability to juxtapose images to discover fine similarities and
compare detail, bring to the scholar tools for research that are far
beyond what was available in the very recent past. Yet the conviction
that these objects of study – the original books, manuscripts,
ephemera, works of art, historical artifacts – not only contain
texts but in themselves are texts that will repay careful scrutiny with
knowledge and pleasure is unlikely to waver. Hand-printed playing cards,
crudely printed legal documents, notes written on shards of pottery,
and cross-written letters from a field of battle all breathe the past
to us. The replacement of paper-based books and manuscripts as vehicles
of information by electrical impulses in cyberspace is a process that
replicates in its own way the replacement of clay tablets by papyrus
scrolls, and the subsequent replacement of papyrus by parchment and parchment
by paper, but it is not yet clear how issues of permanence in relation
to these digital materials will be resolved. We must hope and assume
that we will enable the survival of e-mail, digital files and videotapes
to convey the thrill of discovery to researchers of the future as they
plunge eagerly into their new-old worlds.
We hope that visitors to Jewels in Her Crown: The Treasures from the
Special Collections of Columbia’s Libraries, in both its physical
and its online form, will share our excitement in seeing these extraordinary
books, manuscripts and works of art. We hope also that the exhibition
can stimulate an appreciation of the cultural diversity that forms the
foundation of learning in a modern university and of the way in which,
within a great repository, old objects can be rediscovered by succeeding
generations. Books and manuscripts from different historical periods
are transformed by juxtaposition, their significance slipping and sliding
about as they are placed in changed contexts and new collections added
to old. Under¬ graduates at Columbia studying the Iliad and the Odyssey
may look at a fragments of papyrus from as early as the third century
bce, medieval manuscript abbreviations of the text that were the “Cliff
Notes” versions of their day, the editio princeps (first printed
edition) in 1488, the 1517 edition of the works published by Aldus’s
heirs and presented by the theologian Philip Melancthon to his colleague
Martin Luther, Alexander Pope’s English translation of the Iliad
(1715–1720) and the Odyssey (1725), or the first edition of Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922) – each work in a sense providing a commentary on
the others. As the objects in this exhibition suggest, and the collections
they represent demonstrate more fully, great libraries can transcend
time, space and cultural difference, enriching directly or indirectly
all of us who seek knowledge or experience the pleasure of learning.
Finally, it is impossible to write about special collections without
including a word of gratitude to donors. For 250 years, the Columbia
Libraries have benefited from the generosity of those who have given
books and manuscripts, who have donated funds for the purchase of collections,
and who have encouraged their friends and associates to add to the special
collections. There are many of them. Some of these people have been faculty,
others alumni, but many others have simply acted on a generous conviction
that by giving to libraries they are both preserving the past and enhancing
the future. We believe they are right. Thank you.
Jean Ashton
Director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
THE LIBRARIES
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library ranks as one of the great architectural
libraries of the world and is the only such library to directly support
academic programs in architecture, urban planning, historic preservation,
art history, and archaeology, as well as the liberal arts education of
undergraduates. It was founded in 1890 by Samuel Putnam Avery and Mary
Ogden Avery as a memorial to their son, Henry Ogden Avery, a New York
City architect who died unexpectedly that year at the age of thirty-eight.
The nucleus of the library was Henry’s collection, which included
a number of rarities, as well as his drawings; Mr. and Mrs. Avery also
provided a generous endowment to ensure continued and magnificent growth.
Conceived as a library of architecture, archaeology and the decorative
arts, Avery Library sought from its very beginning to make the great
architectural treatises and plate volumes accessible to students, architects,
and artists. These works, referred to as “Classics,” constitute
the core of Avery’s stellar rare book holdings, which also include
an extensive collection of catalogues of the American building trades,
as well as one of view books of American cities and towns. The Classics
collection today accounts for approximately ten percent of the library’s
380,000 volumes. Included in that figure is one of the largest collections
of architectural periodicals in existence; and since 1934 the library
has produced the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, now an online
database edited at Columbia and published with the support of the J.
Paul Getty Trust. The Drawings and Archives collection has grown from
Henry’s archive to over one million items, with a particular emphasis
on American work, including major archives of Richard Upjohn, Alexander
Jackson Davis, Greene & Greene, Emery Roth & Son and drawings
by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Drawings and Archives department has been
a leader in employing new technologies to make its rich collections accessible
to scholars and practitioners.
In 1912, Avery was the first library at Columbia to receive its own
quarters, separate from Low Library, on the Morningside Heights campus.
A gift from Samuel Putnam Avery, Jr., funded Avery Hall — designed
by William Kendall of McKim Mead and White, and arguably one of the campus’s
most beautiful buildings — to house the library, as well as the
School of Architecture. The building was expanded underground in the
1970s to accommodate the Fine Arts collection and further growth. Most
recently, Avery Library has expanded again, with the opening in 2003
of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Study Center for Art and Architecture,
which houses the Drawings and Archives collection, as well as the University’s
Office of Art Properties. Avery
Library Home Page
Burke Library. The
Special Collections of the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary
comprise, in addition
to the Seminary archives, a number of distinctive collections. The library
of Leander van Ess, a Roman Catholic priest and Biblical translator,
brought to the brand new Protestant seminary what was then the largest
collection of incunabula in America. In addition to papers generated
by its many distinguished faculty members, the Library also contains
the McAlpin Collection of British History and Theology, a comprehensive
collection of works on those topics printed between 1500 and 1700, and
the extraordinary Missionary Research Library which documents in depth
the social and cultural history of Protestant religious missions from
the early 19th-century to the present. The Burke Library is a recent
addition to the Columbia University Libraries community. Burke Library
Home Page
C. V. Starr East Asian Library. The
beginning of Chinese studies in 1902 served as an impetus for the building
of a
library devoted to the subject. Thanks to founding donations from alumnus
and Trustee Horace Walpole Carpentier and the Empress Dowager of China,
the library was one of the earliest and soon became one of the finest
East Asian language collections in the country. The Japanese collection
was begun in the 1920s by Ryusaku Tsunoda, adding to the Chinese Collection;
together they became the East Asian Library in 1935. The Imperial Household
Ministry of Japan donated a collection which includes, among other treasures,
594 woodblock-printed and manuscript volumes covering the range of Japanese
primary sources. The Library also contains a substantial collection of
rare and scarce Korean books and in recent years has expanded its Tibetan
collections. Housed in the former Law School Library in Kent Hall, the
C. V. Starr East Asian Library includes the Kress Seminar Room, where
rare books and manuscripts may be consulted, and an exhibit gallery.
Among the Library’s many treasures are a collection of Chinese
paper gods, oracle bones, an archive of letters from 20th century Japanese
writers, and a 15th-century Korean book, the first to use printed Han’gul.
Starr Library Home Page
Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Special
Collections. The
Special Collections in the Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Library
include incunabula, selected legal treatises, American books printed
in the Confederacy, and many named collections of books and papers derived
from the personal libraries of prominent men in the history of the field.
In addition to the Jay family donation mentioned above, the books include
the library of Joseph Murray, bequeathed to King’s College in 1757,
the law books of Samuel Johnson and William Samuel Johnson, the first
presidents of King’s College and Columbia College respectively,
and the library of James Kent. Additional special collections in canon
law, Roman law, and War Crimes trials are supplemented by the Law School
archives and significant groups of manuscripts and papers related to
legal history and teaching. Law Library, Special Collections Home Page
Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library,
Special Collections. King’s
College began instruction in medicine in 1767 and three years later had
the distinction of granting the first doctor of medicine degree in North
America. From the beginning, the medical school acquired books to support
its studies, but the Health Sciences Library did not come together as
a single entity until the opening of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical
Center in 1928. Even before that, though, the medical school had begun
to create a rare book collection with the purchase of the libraries of
professors John Green Curtis in physiology and George Sumner Huntington
in anatomy. Archives and Special Collections of the Augustus C. Long
Library now comprises some 15,000 rare books including nearly complete
collections of the works of Vesalius and Tagliacozzi. Among the particular
collections of distinction are the Jerome P. Webster Library of Plastic
Surgery, the Lena and Louis Hyman Collection in the History of Anesthesiology,
the Auchincloss Florence Nightingale Collection and the Freud Library.
Archives and Special Collections also serves as the archives for the
University’s four health science schools and holds a substantial
manuscript collection. Health Sciences Library, Archives
& Special Collections Home Page
Barnard College Library, Rare Book
Collection. The
core of the rare book collection of Barnard College is the Overbury collection
of 3,300 books written by women, including first editions and rare publications
by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.
The Barnard College Archives contains records of the college dating back
to its inception and other material documenting the growth and progress
of women’s education in the United States, as well as the records
of the American Woman’s Association. Barnard College Library, Special
Collections
The Columbiana Collection. Columbiana,
established in 1884, is one of the oldest special collections at Columbia.
In 1997
it merged with the University Archives (established in 1991), the central
repository for Columbia records, forming a new entity devoted to maintaining
institutional history. Among the resources the University Archives-Columbiana
provides are administrative records, trustee minutes, pamphlet and clippings
files, photographs, university publications, and ephemera. The King’s
College Room, in Low Library, adjacent to the University Archives-Columbiana
Library reading room, displays paintings, period furniture, and decorative
arts, pertaining to King’s College and Columbia, 1754 to 1850.
Several of the earliest books acquired by the College are on permanent
exhibit there, along with early charters, letters, and significant documents.
University Archives-Columbiana provides reference assistance to the community,
creates exhibits, and conducts various outreach programs. The Archives
report to the Secretary of the University. University Archives and Columbiana
Home Page
Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library. Although
several rare music books were part of the Library collection before 1900,
the Music Library was not organized as a separate entity until 1934.
At that time, a Music Librarian was named and charged with the task of
organizing the collection of scores, correspondence and manuscripts that
had been distributed among the general stacks, the Music Department and
other areas of the campus. Of special interest in what has been since
1997 the Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library, located on the 7th
floor of Dodge Hall, are several hundred early printed books on music
and scores, a collection of libretti from the 19th and 20th centuries,
20,000 recordings of classical and American popular music from the estate
or Robert L. Weiner, holograph facsimiles of twentieth-century piano
music from the Robert Miller Collection, and what is believed to be a
unique collection of zarzuelas (popular Spanish opera scores and parts).
Holdings also include the papers and compositions of Edward MacDowell,
the first head of the Music Department at Columbia, the Seidl Collection,
scores or fragments of scores by Béla Bartók, and Hector
Berlioz, and first or early editions of the works of Luigi Cherubini. Music
Library Home Page.
Oral History Research Office. Founded
by historian Allan Nevins in 1948, Columbia’s oral history program
was the first of its kind in the country and remains the largest within
an academic
institution, comprising over 8,000 taped interviews. Subjects range from
in-depth personal interviews with prominent figures to special projects
that focus on institutions or events. Representative of the scope of
the collection are interviews with Frances Perkins on her years as Secretary
of Labor, with Buster Keaton and D.W. Griffith on film, with Bennett
Cerf and George Braziller on publishing, with the officers of the Carnegie
Corporation on the growth of philanthropy. Other topics include Women
in Law, Physicians and AIDS, Civil Liberties, and African-American Journalists.
Transcripts of the interviews are available for research in the Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. In recent years, the office has undertaken
video interviewing as well, which it hopes to make widely accessible
on the World Wide Web. Three major projects documenting local and national
impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11,
2001 have been undertaken with the support of public and private funding
agencies. Oral History Research Office
Office of Art Properties. Columbia
has been acquiring paintings and works of art since the eighteenth century
when the second
President of King’s College, Myles Cooper, whose own distinguished
portrait by John Singleton Copley is at Columbia, expressed an interest
in establishing an art collection. It was an interest not sustained by
subsequent presidents. Nevertheless, art works — primarily portraits
of faculty and administrators — were acquired and gradually the
collection was broadened to include study materials and a wide variety
of art objects, almost all of them received as gifts. The Office of Art
Properties, charged with cataloging the collection, overseeing its conservation,
and guiding the placement of art on campus, is under the administration
of the Avery Librarian. The Curator of Art Properties also directs the
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery in Schermerhorn Hall.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The
largest repository of special collections on campus, the Rare Book and
Manuscript
Library has been housed since the late 1930s on the sixth floor of Butler
Library. Comprising an estimated 500,000 rare books, 28 million manuscript
items, and vast collections of photographs, audio-visual material, ephemera
and realia, the Library also holds the collections of the former Brander
Matthews Dramatic Museum, which include masks, puppets, portraits, teaching
models, and playbills. Although its collections range from papyrus fragments,
cuneiform tablets, and cylinder seals to newly-minted artist’s
books, the Library’s strongest holdings are in printing and publishing
history, the history of philanthropy, American history and literature,
journalism history, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, human rights,
and the book arts. Distinctive collections with their own curators include
the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture,
the Archives of the Carnegie Corporation, the Herbert H. Lehman Papers,
and the recently acquired archives of Human Rights Watch. Rare
Book & Manuscript Library Home Page
Other Collections. Although most other libraries at
Columbia do not maintain collections of rare books or manuscripts, many
of them in fact, because of their age and the scope of collecting activity,
contain reference materials, subject files, and unique or scarce items
that might in other institutions be considered special collections. Among
these are, for example, the collection of early settlement house reports
in the Social Work Library, the early foreign dissertations in the History
and Humanities Library in Butler, and the many publications in the area
studies libraries that were issued in limited runs or on deteriorating
paper and are no longer available. Some of these are reclassified as
rare when their fragility or value becomes apparent to the users or the
library staff.
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