by Elayne Gardstein

I will save the answer to the following question for last. What are the connections among a painted wooden egg, three United States Presidents, and the Cuban Missile Crisis? Special Collections in Adelphi University Libraries is a unique resource for teaching, learning, and research. I would like to introduce the faculty to Special Collections and describe how they might enhance student learning by utilizing these resources. Trends in digitizing rare materials are equally relevant to current teaching practices and to research accessibility. As we look towards the future, what are some directions our Special Collections will take?

What are Special Collections?

As I described in the Spring 2003 AdLibNews (Adelphi Libraries Newsletter), "Special Collections in Swirbul Library actually consist of 25 separate collections. Items date from 1556 to the present and represent a full range of print and nonprint materials. In addition to books, there are periodicals, unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, printed ephemera, broadsides and musical scores. There are also photographs, tapes, realia (objects, souvenirs, and models), musical instruments, architectural blueprints and drawings, posters, and prints." This year, with the assistance of the FCPE, I created a descriptive website for Special Collections. This is linked to the Library's homepage, and each of the 25 collections has a brief summary of its contents:
http://libraries.adelphi.edu/collections.shtml.
These collections contain rare, valuable, fragile, and special titles that cannot be housed in the main stacks of the library. I might add that much of what we have is due to the efforts of librarian Donald Kelly in Collection Development.

How Can Special Collections Enhance Student Learning?

More recently, there has been increased interest on the part of the faculty in utilizing Special Collections to enrich their students' learning experiences. We have many primary source materials which provide firsthand evidence of information for students to analyze, question, and appreciate. Over the past several decades, we have acquired many secondary scholarly sources to support these collections as well. The following are several examples of Adelphi students' use of Special Collections.

All students using Special Collections learn how such departments work, not only at Adelphi, but also wherever their research may take them. Often appointments must be made in advance, and extra care is required for handling fragile materials. Yes, we are strict where preservation is a concern. However, the rewards of using actual objects rather than reducing everything to the same size on a computer screen can be great.

One way that students learn is to draw comparisons between contemporary subject matter and material more removed in time. Journalism classes study alternative voices in e-zines and compare them to radical writers of 200 years ago. Our Cobbett and Hone collections, described in the above website, are examples of the latter. Another method involves historical research. Students in the history department's senior research seminar are longtime users, studying documents housed in Special Collections and also in our Reference department. The McMillan Panama Canal Collection is a wonderful resource for studying Latin American and Caribbean history; students have been using rare materials published at the time the canal was built a century ago. English literature students are assigned nineteenth century publications to learn about and analyze the culture of Victorian times. Josef Abers' book, The Interaction of Color, was published 40 years ago, but its commentary and folders of color theory illustrations are studied by our art students today. Albers, who worked at the Bauhaus in Germany and later taught in the United States, dedicated his work, "This book is my thanks to my students."

Where Does Digitization Take Us?

Digital resources are another method of highlighting primary source materials housed here and all over the world. Sophomore history research students have been introduced to links for special collections and primary sources from our library webpage:
http://libraries.adelphi.edu/research/genint.shtml#special
These links provide access to repositories of special collections as well as to excellent tutorials for research and strategies for finding these materials. Digitization also takes us to one of our own collections.

As an introduction to journalism of two centuries ago, our students viewed the extensive William Hone Collection website: http://libraries.adelphi.edu/bar/hone/index.html I developed this site with Mieke Caris' collaboration at the FCPE for two reasons. First, I wanted to highlight the collection with biographical information, an online exhibit, a finding aid or inventory of the unpublished manuscript items, and links for further research. Second, I wanted to create a model for expansion of the brief summaries listed under Special Collections on our webpage. While not all of our collections will warrant the same degree of digital description, the enhanced access will greatly benefit our students. Imagine images of rare stringed instruments from the Stoelzer Chamber Music Collection linked to sound clips or dance video clips linked to items from the collection of Ruth St. Denis, the founder of Adelphi's dance department. One future project will involve hyperlinks from electronic records in our ALICAT online catalog to digital images from Special Collections.

When Will Special Collections See the Future?

This fall, University Archives and Special Collections will be moving to a new home in the lower level of the new dormitory building next to Swirbul Library. The move will allow us to review our priorities for preservation as the collections are reshelved in a more spacious, climate controlled space. Due to the efforts of the University Archivist Eugene Neely, fragile university newspapers and heavily used course bulletins from University Archives may be among the first items slated for preservation microfilming and then digitization for computer access. We are learning about recent trends at the university level and are considering how to adapt them to our needs. Centers for digital initiatives and programs for networked scholarly resources will provide greater access to digitized text, images, audio, and video. Content management systems will facilitate display of special collections and provide us with the tools to publish, index, search, and share our treasures locally and globally.

The Answer

So, what are the connections among a painted wooden egg, three United States Presidents, and the Cuban Missile Crisis? Our McMillan Political and Presidential Letters and Memorabilia Collection includes memorabilia and correspondence from Adelphi alumnus Robert McMillan's political career. The blue egg is a souvenir from Ronald Reagan's Easter egg roll at the White House in 1986. A letter from Richard Nixon in 1983 concerned the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during John F. Kennedy's presidency.

Faculty are welcome to contact me, Elayne Gardstein, X3563, for suggestions on how special collections may be used in your classes.