WHAT’S THE USE?

Abstract

What’s so special about special collections is the people who use them. Without the people who use these materials to forward scholarship, to teach new generations, to serve as librarians, archivists, conservators, and curators, or simply to marvel at them, special collections are not special at all.

People who use special collections for research bring to them their own ideas and their own excitement. In the past month at the Ransom Center, a biographer was crafting a tale of a publisher’s life by poring over the publisher’s archive; three students were collating variant editions of a sixteenth-century text for a . . .