Walk into almost any high school, college, or public library in the United States and you will find the same thing: Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Time magazine. . . These are all good things. But some lucky libraries have a little something extra: a section for the rare, valuable, historical, and irreplaceable. Libraries often call this section Special Collections--a dead giveaway that this part of the library is, well . . . special. Special Collections are completely unique.

For over seventy years, the quiet northeast Denton County community of Pilot Point was the home of Rest Cottage, a campus that sheltered unmarried mothers and their children. Young women admitted to Rest Cottage could be teenagers, working or professional women, and either single or divorced from their husbands. They could come from any economic, cultural or educational background, and found their way to Pilot Point from all fifty states, Canada and Mexico.

Time Frames has been a weekly feature for five years in the Sunday edition of the Arlington Star-Telegram and is now available online as a Time Frames Online (TFO) video. The TFO project team creates two new episodes a month. In the videos, the camera pans across the photos, maps, or documents animating the still images while a narrator describes the scene.

The partners of the Fort Worth law firm of Harris Finley & Bogle recently honored the venerable legal career of Jenkins Garrett, Of-Counsel to their firm since 1986, with the gift of the Phillips Texan-Santa Fe Expedition Papers to Special Collections in honor of Jenkins Garrett. This collection is comprised of twelve original and transcribed copies of letters and documents pertaining to Robert B. Phillips, a member of the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition (1841-1842).

The UT Arlington Library Special Collections has acquired some exciting collections! Over the summer, two important additions to the Texas Labor Archives arrived. Among them, Donald Goodman, a long time labor relations educator and arbitrator, donated four boxes containing tape cassettes and LP records of labor songs, beta tapes of labor films, and arbitration case records dating from 1987 to 2004.

Adventure stories were a magic portal to a world of femmes fatales, rags-to-riches sagas, extraordinary exploits, and happy conclusions for readers in the nineteenth century. While widely regarded as working class and boys' literature, all ages and levels of society read the sensational fiction published in story papers and dime novels.1 Today, the yellowed pages offer insight into the moral sentiments of the period and national concerns about manifest destiny, race, and women’s rights.