Entrance in Canaday to Special Collections Reading Room

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.

Meet Our Staff

The Special Collections staff represents a wide range of specialties and areas of expertise.

Special Collections - Staff

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.