The Pennsylvania State University
Special Collections Library

Mission Statement

PSU Libraries’

The University Libraries are a leader in advancing intellectual discovery, information literacy, and lifelong learning. The Libraries connect students and scholars to the world of information and ideas. As an active participant in the worldwide community of scholars, the Libraries foster the teaching, research, service, and outreach goals of Penn State. They select, create, organize, and facilitate access to resources that are relevant to the University's programs and pursuits.

Special Collections

The mission of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library is to collect, preserve, make available, and promote original research materials for Pennsylvania State University faculty, students, and staff, as well as the general and scholarly public, in support of the instructional, research, and public service goals of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. The Eberly Family Special Collections Library preserves materials such as historical records, manuscripts, rare books, photographs, films, oral histories, cartographic materials, and artifacts, which the Library houses in a secure, monitored, and close-stacked environment due to uniqueness, fragility, age, rarity, unusual format, monetary value, and/or importance of subject content.

Collection Development Policies

Historical Collections and Labor Archives

Historical Collections and Labor Archives acquires, preserves, and describes primary source materials that document U.S. labor history and Pennsylvania’s sociocultural, political, and economic heritage. HCLA maintains several hundred groups of archival records and manuscripts, newspapers, photographic materials, cartographic materials, oral histories, leaflets, pamphlets, sound recordings, microfilms, films, and posters dating from 1650 to the 1980s. The collections document Pennsylvania’s core industries, including the railroad, and entrepreneurs, such as Andrew Carnegie, Charles Schwab, and William B. Dickson. HCLA’s holdings on the labor movement include minute books, executive board documents, and office files for important organizations and labor unions, including the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, Amalgamated Lithographers of America, and the International Photoengravers Union. HCLA’s two flagship labor union collections are the United Steelworkers of America and United Mine Workers of America. HCLA also houses the Eighth Air Force Archive, which consists of original primary source documentation and reference materials devoted to the history of this important strategic bombing group during World War II, and the role that 8th Air Force veterans played in defeating the Axis powers.

Rare Books and Manuscripts

Rare Books and Manuscripts encompasses a wide scope of literary, artistic, and historical materials including books, diaries, journals, photographs and authors’ manuscript collections. Major authors represented in the collections include Arnold Bennett, Kenneth Burke, Jean Giraudoux, Christopher Logue, John O’Hara, Vance Packard, Conrad Richter, Françoise Sagan, and Paul West. RBM also collects Pennsylvaniana, including early imprints, Pennsylvania German materials (including the Ammon Stapleton Collection), county histories and atlases, cartographic materials, and regimental histories. Other major collections include aeronautics; agricultural sciences, including rare books on mushrooms; the Allison-Shelley Collection of German literature in translation; American literature from 1790 to the present; art and architectural history, including landscape architecture; Australiana; Bibles in many languages; Black history and literature; emblem books; English literature from 1660 to 1800; fine printing; medieval manuscripts; the works of Joseph Priestly; science fiction; utopian literature; and the Williamscote library of eighteenth-century English history.

Penn State University Archives

The Penn State University Archives is a pro-active collecting unit within the Eberly Family Special Collections Library dedicated to documenting the history of the University as an institution and member of the land-grant, higher education community. The archives supports teaching, research, service, and administration by developing and managing archival, manuscript, pictorial, cartographic, audiovisual, electronic, print and object collections. These resources have been judged to be of permanent value in recording the history of the University in its various roles and contexts. In addition, the archives also documents the careers and activities of prominent faculty and alumni, supports an active records management program, manages the sports history archives of the University’s intercollegiate athletics programs, and collects materials related to the history of the Centre County region.