Journal Article: “Special Collections on a Shoestring: A Survey of Non-ARL Libraries Servicing Rare Book Collections”

The article linked below was recently published by RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage.

Title

Special Collections on a Shoestring: A Survey of Non-ARL Libraries Servicing Rare Book Collections

Authors

Lynne M. Thomas
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Source

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
 Vol 23, No 2 (2022)

DOI

About the Article

This article reports the first national survey that creates a baseline for documenting the experience of working with rare books in libraries without Association of Research Libraries (ARL) membership: a group of libraries that make up about half the field of librarians working with rare books. Scarcely studied despite decades of comparable studies of their ARL library colleagues, librarians working in non-ARL rare book collections have comparable demographics, professional training, and standards for their work as their peers in ARL libraries. Their experiences doing the work in non-ARL libraries demonstrate a significant disparity in resources for acquisitions, security, staffing, and fundraising. These experiences of half of the special collections professionals in the field require further study, reintroducing their narratives into our understanding of “what rare books librarianship looks like.”

Direct to Full Text Article

Direct to Full Text Article
23 pages; PDF

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, Associations and Organizations, Libraries, News, Reports