Copley Library Annual Report 2022-2023

Destination for Information Resources

Attention Travelers! If the past is what you seek… If you want to visit another era–from the recent past or all the way back to antiquity, the library’s Archives and Special Collections can take you there. These visits are brought about not through a time machine, but through the things that were left behind: letters; diaries; postcards; even cuneiform tablets. Their survival speaks to their enduring value–what was considered important not only to people at that time, but also to succeeding generations. These objects illuminate how people once lived; what ideas animated their intellectual life; and what they believed in. They also show us by comparison what has changed–including opinions and beliefs that to us no longer seem true. Special Collections collects ephemera (postcards, papers, and memorabilia) as well as rare books on a variety of subjects.

For example, you can peruse 19th century household guides containing home remedies like the popular Gunn’s New Family Physician Home book of Health

published in 1866 or get beauty tips from 1841’s Heath’s Book of Beauty edited by the Countess of Blessington. You can delve into family papers like the Davidson Family papers which includes photographs and correspondence written during Ethel Helena Davidson’s time as an American Expeditionary Force nurse in France during World War I; a scrapbook of Ethel’s wartime experiences and army records. Our postcard collection includes messages written from exotic destinations anytime from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. Meanwhile the University Archives documents the life of our university through the records of its employees and its administrators. Through these documents you can get a glimpse of the thoughts, expectations and struggles of individuals and university organizations of the past.The Archives also chronicles events and milestones experienced by the university’s students as they navigated their academic and social lives. University records in the Archives date from the 1940s up to the present time. The Archives can reveal the past through its collection of

physical objects–photographs, videos, oral histories, news clippings and correspondence. The Archives can also showcase the recent past through the digital objects we captured like Faculty Newsnotes whose print version had disappeared only to be reborn online.

16 | HELEN K. AND JAMES S. COPLEY LIBRARY