Comments on: 11 (Extra) Special Collections in University Libraries

By: jenisedai

jenisedai — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:21:32 +0000

The University of Central Florida in Orlando has the Van Sickle Leftist Pamphlet Collection, a collection of communist and socialist political pamphlets from the 1920s through the 1970s. Over 2000 of them are online and viewable through UCF’s online catalog (http://ucf.catalog.fcla.edu/cf.jsp).

By: Mikey

Mikey — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:17:26 +0000

Appalachian State has the largest collection of NASCAR media

By: Jen

Jen — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:32:55 +0000

First off, I’d like to send a big “howdy doo” to my fellow Spartans!

But here’s a list of the many collections found at MSU’s library:

http://www.lib.msu.edu/features/unique.jsp

By: Sidney Carton

Sidney Carton — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:39:08 +0000

UC Riverside currently has the largest Science Fiction collection on Earth in its Special Collections.

The Eaton Collection, (Which Grows monthly, I work here and just ordered over 60 new books for it) includes not only books but movies, anime, comics and manga and amateur fanzines created by sci-fi fan groups dating back to the early 50′s if not earlier!

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:01:15 +0000

There are many libraries out there with pornography collections, both ancient and modern. One of the reasons the collections aren’t normally publicized is that, unsurprisingly, such collections are often the target of theft or damage. The Playboy collection at my alma mater was kept locked up not because of the content itself, but due to people’s habits of taking razor blades to the pages.

By: dazzlelib

dazzlelib — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:48:17 +0000

Rhode Island School of Design’s Special Collections has plans and photos of WWI dazzle camouflage for ships. Think zebra strips, cubist paintings, and lots of color, http://www.risd.edu/dazzle.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:58:06 +0000

I know my last list of items weren’t from a university library per se, so here are a few Australian university library curios to make up for it!

‘Flinders University of South Australia
Library houses the archives of the Eros foundation – a sex industry lobby group. Melbourne University has an interesting collection of photographs revealing the composer Percy Graingerâ€™s soundly beaten bottom and Sydney University Library has a euphemistically entitled special collection that is housed in the Fisher library. This collection contains the donated private collection of William Deane. His collection contains 1123 works published between 1609 and 1982 most of which are literary erotica. There is also a good number of works current and historic on the subject of flagellation as well as bibliographies and histories of sex and sexual relations’
Source:
Erotica in Australian Libraries: Are We Negligent Collection Managers?
Edgar Crook
http://libres.curtin.edu.au/LIBRE11N2/crook.htm

Happy reading :-)

By: AmyG

AmyG — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:34:47 +0000

Speaking of odd collections: the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, FL is a “collection of collections” and includes many oddities from false teeth to carved eggshells to old shoes to pottery & glass. It has the added bonus of being located in one of Henry Flagler’s former resort hotels, so the building is a bit of an oddity itself. Example: the former indoor pool (pictured on Neatorama recently) is now a gallery floor. Good stuff!

By: Katherine

Katherine — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 02:19:59 +0000

The State Library of Victoria, Australia, holds the WG Alma Conjuring Collection, which ‘contains around 2000 books on magic, 60 magazine titles, 1500 photographs, 300 posters, over 400 detailed research files on individual magicians and other magic memorabilia’.

Most of the posters have been scanned and made available on the library’s catalogue, and make for very entertaining viewing! Hello frogmen and headless ladies.

The collection also includes models and diagrams which explain the mysteries of ‘The Buzz Saw Illusion’, ‘The Elastic Lady’, ‘The Protean Cabinet’ and ‘The Electrocution Mystery’. However, when Alma donated his collection he wanted to maintain the magicians’ code, and insisted that ‘access to the models and detailed instructions of the tricks of his trade should be limited to magicians and bona fide researchers’. Some are on display in the library’s public exhibitions, if you fancy trying to puzzle them out.

http://guides.slv.vic.gov.au/magic
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/about/news/focus_on/alma.html

Other special collections at the SLV include:

- the zine collection (one of only a handful of such collections in libraries worldwide),

- the news-stand collection, a time capsule of Melbourne’s reading habits, formed by periodically purchasing every item for sale on a Melbourne news-stand: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/10/23/1256147891355.html

- the Political Ephemera Collection, which includes ‘hundreds of thousands of handbills, flyers, leaflets, bulletins, posters, badges and stickers from a wide range of Victorian political and community organisations’:
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/collections/australiana/ephemera.html

- the Anderson Chess Collection, which contains over 12,000 items (including books, tournament reports, magazines and pamphlets), and which is ‘one of the three largest public chess collections in the world’:
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/collections/chess/index.html
Many of the modern publications can be consulted in an open-access space fitted with a number of chess sets, where you can practice your newly-researched moves.

Libraries are wonderous things indeed…

By: sandy

sandy — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:58:09 +0000

Leeches are not used often in the U.S. but in Europe they are very much utilized. The saliva in a leech has an anticoagulant in it. The leech drinks the “bad” blood from a bruise or an infection and the anticoagulant stimulates blood flow to the affected area. The best medicinal leeches come from Ireland.