Current Issue: Fall 2025
Article
Fall 2025
“If This Book Should Chance to Roam”: the Importance of Children’s Marginalia in Rare Books Collections
Elliott Kuecker, Katie Grotewiel, and Zoe Thomas
This article describes why child-created marginalia can serve as an important source within rare books in special collections librarie ...
Recently Published
Editor's Note • Fall 2025
Editor’s Note: Fact Check
Diane Dias De Fazio
A funny thing happened on the way to the publication, readers. Editing this journal turned me into a kind of legal writer. Kind of. Increasingly, since my tenure’s outset, each cycle has provided me with more references to government publications, legislative acts, and case law citations. Who knew that I’d be hunting down executive orders—much less fussing over how to punctuate and capitalize them—more often than I confirm titles and page numbers from SAA publications? ...
Article • Fall 2025
“Navigating Social Networks at the Margins: Women in Science Archives, Then and Now
Bethany G. Anderson, Mary Borgo Ton, and Kristen Allen Wilson
“No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science,” draws on feminist approaches and text-mining technologies to surface stories about women in the domestic science movement at the University of Illinois. This article describes approaches used to digitize the domestic science collection in its conceptualization and initial stages. The project was originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in August 2024; the grant’s cancellation in April 2025 ...
Article • Fall 2025
Neutrality Unbound: the Value of Rare Book Collections in STEMM Classrooms
Chad Kamen
Though the book has a storied past as a container for scientific knowledge, a range of challenges exist for asserting its value to coursework in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). Much of the information that historical STEMM texts convey is widely available, dated, or peripheral to the curriculum of disciplinary instructors. These challenges are exacerbated by the ways in which prejudiced collecting has created special collections holdings that overrepresent and lionize the contributions of white, wealthy, Western men. To ascertain and assert the relevance of rare STEMM collections to contemporary scholarship, librarians must confront how these materials exist as enduring witnesses to bias in the development of the academic scientific community. ...