Who Uses Special Collections?

By Sally L. Gross

. . . And do you also wonder what Special Collections is all about? A library's special collections department is non-circulating material on "special" subject areas that are collected in-depth. At the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries our Special Collections focus on four main collecting areas: Texas; the Mexican American War of 1846-1848; Mexican political history from 1810-1920; and the history of cartography with an emphasis on the Gulf of Mexico and the Greater Southwest. In addition to books, maps, and periodicals there are also manuscript and archival collections, photograph collections, sheet music, graphics, newspapers, and more-all of which relate to the four collecting areas.

Of course, many of the users of Special Collections are affiliated with UTA. Students, both undergraduate and graduate, put it to a range of uses, from class assignments to scholarly research for theses and dissertations. Professors use it to research materials for writing articles, papers, and books. However, on any given day you may find a whole array of other people using Special Collections, whether in person or through telephone or e-mail contact. They may sometimes be affiliated with other universities, but Special Collections is also used by the broader community at large. These local users may be interested in knowing more about the Arlington or Fort Worth area, may be doing family research, may be high school students who need primary source materials for papers, or they may be looking for a photograph or map.

One heavily used collection is the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection, which has over 3 million negatives and prints produced by Star-Telegram photographers from the early 20th century up to 1990. People often want photographs of themselves or relatives; recently a man who had polio as a youngster asked for a photo of himself on crutches receiving an award. Sometimes they are searching for a picture of a house or street scene; they might be interested in it for personal reasons or may be involved in a historic preservation effort. Sometimes people are looking for "decoration", something for the walls of their office or restaurant; photos of sports figures are quite popular for office walls while restaurants tend to like nostalgic scenes. Photographs to illustrate books are requested all the time; for example, Jan Jones, who spoke at the December 2000 Friends of the UTA Library meeting, used photographs from the UTA Special Collections to illustrate her recent book on Billy Rose presents - Casa Manana. Images are requested for videos and films. Our graphics were used extensively to illustrate the Emmy award-winning series on the Mexican American War produced by KERA, the Dallas Public Broadcasting affiliate. The collection's photos from the Roswell incident are used often by film makers.

Maps are used with more frequency as our collections become better known. The Texas Map Society meets at UTA in October of every year, and the attendees always visit Special Collections. Map collectors sometimes bring maps to compare with our copies. People are using maps more when they do historical research, and the Sanborn fire insurance maps are often used by researchers trying to track down the previous use of properties, among other uses.

Genealogists are a logical group of users, because the UTA Special Collections house county records on microfilm for the counties surrounding Tarrant and Dallas counties. This microfilm is deposited at UTA by the Texas State Library so that it is closer to the actual counties that generated the records. Because we collect Texas materials in depth we often have books that interest genealogists, such as transcriptions of census for a county and cemetery records, as well as city, county, church, and civic groups histories.

Another use of Special Collections involves Interlibrary Loan. Other users may request something as commonplace as the county records microfilm, or may require the microfilm that we have from the state archives of Yucatán and Honduras.

All in all Special Collections is used by many different people, from the casual user needing local information to the serious researcher writing a book, from someone in search of a single photograph to a PBS station documenting wars or lives lived. And the Special Collections staff are happy to help everyone of them!