University of Guelph Library
Chief Librarian Michael Ridley's presentation to Jean Little, March 2002.
Special Collections
The Library's special collections house primary and secondary source materials that support research in its major subject collecting areas. Special collections offers material that, because of subject, value, rarity, uniqueness, source, condition, or form, are gathered together separately from the library's main circulating or reference services. Original items may be correspondence, manuscripts, or diaries, for example. Secondary sources are usually commercially or privately published items, e.g., books or posters.
Our collections are housed in an environmentally controlled area with controlled temperature, lighting and humidity. Special collections staff also undertake to preserve and conserve individual materials. In some cases, because of the research intensiveness and interrelationships among disciplines in our university library, parts of some collections may circulate as well.
Our special collections support university research in areas such as children's literature, theatre and performance studies, home management and cuisine. A few are nationally significant collections, such as the L.M. Montgomery Collection and the Dan H. Laurence Collection of Shaviana. In addition, this section of the library houses 25,000 rare books that contain many publications in disciplines such as horticulture, natural history, veterinary medicine, and Canadian history.
The use of all special collections is provided for researchers in the Wellington County Room. For preservation and security reasons, these materials do not circulate and there may be some restrictions on what can be viewed. Normally, faculty and students, visiting scholars, alumni, and the general public can use these materials upon request — there is no need to register.
Catalogue access to special collections is provided by the online catalogue, Primo. Knowledgeable staff are available to assist researchers with a variety of printed and electronic finding aids and to retrieve materials for study.