Buley Library’s Special Collections and Archives hold a diverse selection of primary source resources that include:
Please Visit Us! For more details, please visit the Special Collections Website
Our specialty is creating opportunities for students to interact with primary resources and rare and unique examples of cultural production throughout history. We relish the chance to work with faculty across the disciplines to identify and present material to your students that will augment your pedagogy and provide memorable learning experiences for your students.
Instruction sessions can be focused introductions to primary sources in general or to specific genres of material. We also conduct workshops designed to engage students in hands-on creative experiences, as well as provide research introductions to materials that might form the basis for course-based, small analytical exercises or larger research projects.
To arrange a meeting to see materials, plan a class visit, or explore ways that our primary sources could be integrated into your curriculum, please contact the department at specialcollections@southernct.edu, or contact one of our staff:
Special Collections and Archives offers unparalleled opportunities for students to pursue deeply engaged, long term independent research based on primary sources. This might take many forms. Historically, for example, Special Collections and Archives has supported senior thesis projects, Master’s thesis research, and projects funded by Undergraduate Research Grant.
Special Collections and Archives maintains a consistent drive to create displays and exhibitions of primary source materials. Increasingly, we are looking to create persistent digital displays that can be of use in pedagogy outside of the Special Collections and Archives suite. For more on Digital Resources, see below. In addition to our internal efforts as displaying our collections, students with projects of especial depth or merit may be offered the opportunity to create a display of their work for public consumption. Some examples of exhibitions mounted in the past year, all of which have included student participation, are an exhibition of New Haven Mayoral, Papers, digital displays of union and labor posters, a digitized version of astronomical cards, analysis and interpretation of a curious 18th century breviary, and materials drawn from the papers of former SCSU Biology professor and ecological activist Dr. Steven Collins.
Internships in Special Collections and Archives can encompass a wide gamut of experiences which will give students exposure to practical and theoretical skills that are especially useful in cultural heritage and academic careers, but are widely applicable. A student completing an internship in Special Collections and Archives will, in as much as possible, end that internship with resume assistance and work on a small, but tangible, project (e.g. a LibGuide or physical or digital display). If you have students interested in work for credit in Special Collections, we would be delighted to discuss opportunities.
Buley Library participates in the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA), a statewide initiative to make digitized primary sources available not only to the SCSU community and Connecticut residents, but to the whole world. Currently, our largest collection, digitized and uploaded by Buley’s Technical Services Department, is the Mayor John DiStefano Jr. papers, which represent an official record of Mr. DiStefano’s time as mayor of New Haven. We invite you to regularly check into out growing collection of freely available digital sources on CTDA.
