Our collections exist to be used. When students work directly with primary source materials, historic photographs, and documents that are old or unique, they discover an excitement and passion not generated by textbooks.
Primary source documents can inspire, but they also teach about learning to verify sources, tracking down connections, finding evidence from content and from physical clues.
The collection of rare books and printed ephemera in Special Collections, containing approximately 200,000 titles, covering a variety of subjects written or produced in America, Europe and Asia. The collections concern a range of subjects and include a variety of materials, such as:
Collections have been fully cataloged in the UO Libraries catalog, LibrarySearch, and may be searched by keyword for collection title. Some collections, due to their size, donor requests and context relationships, have been treated as archival collections. For example, the book collection of Dwight Bennett Newton, an American writer of western novels, was retained in his personal papers and are listed in the Finding Aid. When this occurs, a listing of the titles are published in Archives Space Public. You will find catalog records in LibrarySearch, with links to Archives Space Public where finding aids are published, and you should always start your searches there. Also, some titles out of copyright may have been digitized and can be found in Oregon Digital. To assist in your discovery for rare printed material and the Medieval manuscript book, you will find more detailed information in this LibGuide.
1501 Kincaid Street
Eugene, OR 97403
P: 541-346-3053
F: 541-346-3485