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LIS – 111
SPECIAL MATERIALS
Rechel N. Manoop-Escabarte, RL
Instructor

OVERVIEW
 Definition of Terms
 Nature and Characteristics of Special Materials
 Management of special materials

WHAT IS the
meaning of the word
SPECIAL for you?

Special Materials
■ Are special collections name applied to the materials
housed in a separate unit with specialized security and
user services.
■ A collection of materials segregated from a general library
collection according to form, subject, age, condition, rarity,
source or value.

Terms you are familiar with:
BOOK
LIBRO
AKLAT

■ A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank
sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials,
usually fastened together to hinge at one side.

NON-BOOK

■ Non-book resources include material such as microfilms,
microfiches, dissertations, posters, reports, slides, stamps,
photos, maps, postcards, brochures,

AUDIOVISUAL

■ Audiovisual may refer to works with both a sound and a
visual component, the production or use of such works, or
the equipment used to create and present such works.

■ Special Collections material isn’t necessarily old. While our
ancient Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets date back as
far as 2500 BC, we also collect examples of modern fine
printing, and digital archives.
■ The University of Manchester Library holds one of the
largest assemblies of Special Collections material in
Britain, occupying approximately 20,000 meters of
shelving.

What are Special Collections?
■ Printed material: books and journals regarded as special
because of their age, rarity, fragility, provenance – (is a
record of ownership), association and/or financial value.
■ Manuscripts: generally individual, hand-written items,
including codices (volumes), scrolls and single-sheet
material.

What is a Special Collection?
■ A special collection is a group of items, such as rare books or
documents, that are either irreplaceable or unusually rare and
valuable. For this reason special collections are stored separately
from the regular library collections in a secure location with
environmental controls to preserve the items for posterity. Special
collections also include rare items that are focused on a single topic,
such as aviation or women's history. Special collections are created
to benefit scholars by grouping related materials together in one
repository. Often a repository will specialize in a limited number of
subject areas for their special collections, to distinguish the
institution from other libraries.
■ Houses rare, fragile, and unique materials ranging from a 4,000 year
old Sumerian tablet to early printed books, photographs and prints,
sheet music, ephemera, Florida history and ecology archives, and
history and literature collections. Many of these items can be
viewed in person on the USF Tampa Library’s 4th floor.

Sample of Special Collection
■ Manuscripts: generally individual, hand-written items,
including codices (volumes), scrolls and single-sheet
material. Because they are hand-written all manuscripts
are unique. They include religious, ritualistic, literary,
historical, administrative and legal texts, and life-writings.
Many are beautifully illuminated.

■ Archives: documents which were created or received,
accumulated and used by an individual or institution in the
course of their daily activities, and preserved for their
continuing value. Archives provide us with primary evidence
of the transactions, processes and events they record. They
often have a complex structure, and can contain a huge
variety of material.

■ Visual collections: including works of art, book illustration,
analogue photographs, and objects that link visual and
literary cultures from the ancient world to the present.
■ Maps: the map collection offers an extensive range of
historical maps ranging from a 15th-century map of the
world to an enviable collection of old maps and plans of
Manchester.
■ Secondary literature that supports the Special Collections,
in areas such as book history and manuscript studies.

■ Printed material: books and journals regarded as special
because of their age, rarity, fragility, provenance,
association and/or financial value. Spanning in date from
the 15th century to the present, they range from luxury
books printed on vellum and beautifully illustrated, to
ephemera, cheap broadsides and other forms of street-
literature.

Types of library collection
■ There are three types of library collections—general,
subject, and specialized—and these are divided into such
categories as books, journals, newspapers, audiovisual
materials, pictorial publications, sheet music, phonograph
records, maps, and microfilms, depending upon the nature
of the collection.

WHAT is an ARCHIVES?
■ Archives are the collections of historical records that are
established to document the lives of individuals and
organizations. Archives are comprised of primary source
documents which have been accumulated over a lifetime.
The University Archives was established to preserve the
history of the University. Some of the materials found in the
University Archives include the records of campus offices,
departments, and individuals, interviews, photographs,
recordings, copies of University publications, scrapbook,
etc.

archives
■ The most central term to the field of archives is also the
most fraught. The word “archives” carries within it twelve
commonly used and sometimes overlapping meanings.
Archivists generally recognize only three senses of the word
(the records, the facility where they are stored, and the
organization responsible for both), but Richard Pearce-
Moses’ Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology
(released in 2005) identified six.

■ Archivists, including Terry Cook and William Maher, have decried
both the plethora of senses for “archives,” and the non-archivist’s
urge to create yet more senses that do not confine themselves to the
canonical senses. In this regard, Solon J. Buck wrote, “It is not only,
as an assistant of mine once said, that many people when they
encounter the word ‘archives’ do not know whether one is supposed
to eat them or to use flit [an insecticide] on them! More serious is the
fact that so many different conceptions or misconceptions of the
meaning of the word prevail among those who are aware that it has
some relation to records or documents.”

■ Roscoe R. Hill’s solution to these overlapping senses was to suggest
new words to replace some of the senses, but his best creation
“archivology” was already covered by the existing neologism
“archivy.” [“Archival Terminology,” American Archivist 6, no. 4
(October 1943): 206–211.]
■ Even given these many senses identified in this dictionary, archivists
still also employ others. For instance, Hilary Jenkinson, famously (to
archivists, at least) claimed that government records could not be
considered archives if a continuous chain of custody had not been
maintained, thereby reducing the definition of “archives” to its
narrowest possible state. Otherwise, he asserted, the records could
not be treated as evidence, and they were, essentially, null and void—
though a nongovernmental body might take them in, as a curiosity,
we assume.

■ Early use of the term made a clear distinction between records
(always active) and archives (always inactive), causing writers to use
“records and archives” to clarify they were referring to records
currently in use by their creators and those that had passed over into
the archives for secondary use. Similarly, writers in the first half of
the twentieth century drew a line between archives (permanent
institutional or, especially, public records received by repositories)
and manuscripts (permanent records of people, families, and
institutions collected by repositories). The end of the twentieth
century tended more to demonstrate the profession’s attempts to
erase the lines between the field of archives and the historical
manuscripts tradition—and to recognize the essential similarity
between historical records regardless of their source or manner of
acquisition.

■ Archivists occasionally combine “archives” with another word to
clarify its meaning, as in “archives facility” or “archives organization.”
They also employ the adjective “archival” before other words to
provide the clarity that the word “archives” sometimes cannot. Such
usages include “archival institution,” “archival records,” “archival
profession,” and so on. To be sure, sometimes a reader or listener
cannot definitively tell which sense the writer or speaker intended,
yet we manage to communicate with one another despite this
polysemy.
■ The term “archive” overlaps significantly but not precisely with this
term, sometimes serving as a singular form of it, yet at other times
sharing the same sense merely without the addition of a final “s.”

When Your Archives and Special
Collections Aren’t Special?
■ A special collection is a group of items, such as rare books or
documents, that are either irreplaceable or unusually rare and
valuable. For this reason, special collections are stored separately
from the regular library collections in a secure location with
environmental controls to preserve the items for posterity. Special
collections also include rare items that are focused on a single topic,
such as aviation or women’s history. Special collections are created
to benefit scholars by grouping related materials together in one
repository. Often a repository will specialize in a limited number of
subject areas for their special collections, to distinguish the
institution from other libraries.

Quiz
Question!
What’s the difference between Special
Collections and Archives?

Special Collections focuses on
– printed material such as early printed books, pre-1850
– books from presses
– 18th - 20th century newspapers
– theses
– maps
– pamphlets
– microfilm
– collections donated by individuals
– collections of literary manuscripts.
■ Archives focuses on records created in everyday life such as letters, diaries and
estate ledgers.

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