Distinctive library collections

April 23, 2010

Part of why I liked the zine collection at the Multnomah County Library (see my recent post, too) is that it reflects part of the culture of Portland. Especially with budgets being cut across the country, libraries might feel stretched just trying to maintain a core collection, so seeing these unique (or unusual or at the very least interesting) collections continue to exist is cool. I’ve run across three such collections recently that I’d like to share with you.

Archives, since they usually have a specific focus and can collect deeply in that area, often have some of the neatest collections. For example, the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College include private papers, recordings, teaching materials, and photographs belonging to the late poet. What makes this collection really noteworthy is that Stafford wrote every single day for the last 43 years of his life, producing 20,000 pages. He also saved letters that he received and sometimes even included a copy of his replies–another 100,000 sheets. The website doesn’t provide access to every item in the collection, but you can browse books, poems, audio and video recordings, and images. In “Evidence of me…”, Sue McKemmish discusses different levels of personal recordkeeping and explores how “memories of me” become “memories of us.” While not everyone wants to (or should!) keep a record of everything he or she writes, having such a huge body of work from a well-known figure is incredible.

The National Library of Medicine has a new web exhibition, “An Iconography of Contagion,” that includes many examples of 20th century public health posters from around the world. And again, a specialized organization can offer an extensive, specialized collection. But what I love is that they’re making these items available for viewing online. There are the war-era warnings against catching STIs that you’d expect, but there are also more recent posters that attempt to educate people about, for example, the way HIV/AIDS is and isn’t spread, and even more interesting things like one poster from China in 1935 that discourages spitting in public, which facilitated the spread of TB.

And lest this post be entirely about collections in highly specialized libraries, I’ll also direct you to a recent article in Fine Books Magazine about the Jewish cookbook collection at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. When a patron asked where the Jewish cookbooks were and the reference librarian, Roberta Saltzman, discovered the library only had a few, she began buying Jewish cookbooks at online auctions and donating them to the library. The collection includes over than 700 cookbooks (more than double the number the Library of Congress holds, according to an article from last year in Forward), many of them collections printed by synagogue sisterhoods. The collection also includes one cookbook printed as a fundraiser for the Jüdischer Frauenbund, “an early German feminist organization” in 1935 during the early part of Hitler’s reign. The collection is nearly entirely Saltzman’s doing; NYPL just accepts her donations and preserves the cookbooks.

What are your favorite distinctive library collections?

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Tags: digital collections, interesting collections, special libraries