About Special Collections
Mission & Vision
Special Collections staff promote teaching and learning with the collections through exhibitions, class visits, research consultations, internships, and public programs.
The department offers opportunities for the college community to engage actively and critically with primary resources and to conduct original research. Special Collections supports disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches that foster materiality study, visual literacy, and the discovery of diverse, non-traditional narratives about and within the collections.
Materials are for use within Special Collections and cannot be checked out.
Explore Special Collections
The Special Collections Department manages the College’s extensive collections of rare books, manuscripts, art works, cultural artifacts, digital collections, and the College’s archives in support of the overall College mission.
Art and Artifacts Collections
Bryn Mawr’s Art and Artifacts collections number more than 50,000 objects, including fine, decorative, and culturally-specific art objects from across place and time, archaeological and ethnographic materials, and scientific instruments and specimens.
Rare Books and Manuscripts Collections
Bryn Mawr’s collections include approximately 60,000 rare books and a million manuscript pages, as well as historical maps, prints, and ephemera.
Mineral Collection
Bryn Mawr College's excellent collection of more than 100,000 rock and mineral specimens supports teaching and research in the Geology department.
College Archives
The College Archives holds more than 3 million items and the collection spans over 2,000 linear feet of records, consisting of primarily document administrative decisions and campus life, from 1885 to today.
Digital Collections
Digitized works and historical materials from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges can be found in the TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections repository.
Records Management
Records management is the systematic control of records throughout their lifecycle -- from their creation or receipt to their disposal or transfer to the College Archives.
Meet Our Staff
The Special Collections staff represents a wide range of specialties and areas of expertise.
Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Racism in Special Collections
In response to growing concerns about the historical and present-day forms of racism and inequity on the Bryn Mawr College campus, the Bryn Mawr Special Collections Department has taken up the charge of reconsidering the histories of colonialism and racism that have shaped the formation and presentation of our collections of historical, cultural, and artistic works. We have been actively working to address these legacies through increased transparency about the acquisition histories and cultural significance of our collections, a recognition of potentially harmful descriptive language in our databases and catalogues and renewed efforts to acquire objects in a just manner that expand the diversity of artistic works, particularly contemporary artworks, represented in our collections.