History of Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College

Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College are comprised of a group of objects—including manuscripts, letters, photographs, art, books, and artifacts—that are deemed unusually rare or irreplaceable, and which must be stored in a secure location with environmental controls to preserve the items and ensure current and future access to them.

Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections are intended to foster teaching, learning, and research. We, the Special Collections staff, welcome interrogation, critique, and insights into how we can continuously improve upon our work. We recognize that there are inherent barriers to accessing Special Collections, and inherent biases in collecting practices. These may lead to a feeling that the collections are elitist or exclusive. We are working towards creating a more accessible, ethical, and anti-racist framework for the execution of our work.

Part of this work relies on understanding how Special Collections came together. Material in Special Collections ranges widely by period and region and include natural history objects, works of art, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, photographs, audio-visual materials, archival documents, books, manuscripts, and scientific instruments. We recognize that there is inherent bias in what was collected, preserved, and made accessible through exhibits and digital access. These objects were primarily given to the College by faculty, alumni, and donors, and thus bear out their individual interests, politics, beliefs, etc. Many of these objects are the gifts of people who benefitted from systems of power and privilege that shaped the world today. Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections Department recognizes its role as a participant in these same systems—including the ways we acquire, describe, and exhibit materials.

Some of the first educational and decorative resources acquired by the college are now located in Special Collections. Many of these were purchased by M. Carey Thomas, first as Dean and then as President, and her companion Mary Garrett. They collected furniture, paintings, prints, and objects for The Deanery—their house—as well as documentary photographs, prints, and plaster casts which were used in curriculum and displayed in Taylor Hall and Old Library.

These items were supplemented by an assemblage of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities collected in the early 20th century by the first faculty members of the Department of Art and Archaeology. By the 1940s, major gifts of prints, drawings, and paintings had been received from Prof. Emeritus Howard L. Gray, Roy R. Neuberger, and various other faculty and alumnae. The Ella Riegel Memorial Collection for Mediterranean Archaeology was established circa 1940, and ethnographic collections were established by Frederica de Laguna in the 1950s. These collections of art and artifacts became formalized as the College Collections Department within the Library in 1980. Additional gifts to the collection have come from alumnae and reflect their interests.

The Rare Book & Manuscripts Collection was formally established in 1940, and included the classical library of Professor Hermann Sauppe purchased by Mary Garrett in 1894. Additional rare book and manuscript collections were built through donations from the College’s graduates and other friends over the years, including Ethelinda Schaeffer Castle (Class of 1908), Howard Goodhart and his daughter Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (Class of 1935), Ellery Yale Wood (Class of 1952), and Philadelphia book collector Seymour Adelman. Adelman also endowed a fund for the purchase of rare books and manuscript materials. This endowment permits us to continue to add to the collections.

Many items in the collections contain historical language and content that may be considered offensive, for example, language and images that were used historically to refer to racial, ethnic, or other cultural communities. For example, there are collections created by people in power that discuss or describe marginalized populations from an outsider perspective (such as 19th century European/American travel writing in Africa, Asia, or the Americas). These types of collections (objects, documents, images, publications, and other materials) have been retained in their original format for the purposes of teaching and education about the power dynamics and history of these works.

In other cases, the cultural politics and power dynamics behind a collection are more inconspicuous. For example, there are many non-Western cultural art and artifacts in the collection that don’t visibly reveal the uneven power dynamics in which they were sold and acquired. Many of these objects were collected and exchanged by white collectors and art dealers who benefited from "owning” these objects, often with little to no benefit to the individuals or communities from which these cultural objects originated or to their descendant communities. These objects, then, powerfully represent a colonialist and imperial worldview, but one that is not obviously inscribed on the objects themselves. This creates a valuable teaching opportunity about the subtle but pernicious forms of racial power embedded in cultural objects.

The College Archives was established in 1980. The college’s historical records were transferred from administrative offices to the Archives after that date.  Most collections of alumnae/i papers were acquired after that date, generally from older alum, and as a result there is a lack of representation of alum from historically marginalized groups, since Bryn Mawr had few students of color for the first 50 years of its founding. The College Archives is actively collecting records to address this silence in the archives, particularly through oral history projects.

The Art & Artifacts Collection was united administratively with the Rare Book & Manuscript Collection as the Special Collections Department in 1999, but only physically brought together in 2011 when the staff and most of the collections were consolidated in the Eva Jane Romaine Coombe ’52 Special Collections Suite in Mariam Coffin Canaday Library.

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections includes over 50,000 art and artifact objects, over 60,000 rare books, the College archives, graphic collections, and numerous significant manuscript collections. The collections reflect the range of interests of their donors, and thus support teaching, advanced research, and exhibitions across numerous fields. We continually look to faculty, staff and students to understand how we can improve upon our work in Special Collections and how we can better contribute to the college.