In the past year, more students have entered the classroom of the Haas Arts Library than the study room. Special Collections librarians Jae Rossman and Molly Dotson joined us this Tuesday to discuss what this means, what is available through the arts library, and how instructors have taken advantage of the Haas Special Collections.

The first step to integrating special collections into the classroom is to realize that the arts library has been reorganized to make accessing materials as straightforward as possible. A fifteen seat seminar room with its own projector has been installed on site, and rather than being spread throughout different libraries and exhibition spaces, the arts Special Collections are all housed either in the Haas library or offsite at the library shelving facility (LSF). Although items at the LSF must be requested online, a location filter for “Haas Special Collections” on Orbis will still find them, making searching for relevant materials more intuitive.

The materials available through special collections are diverse. The Haas Arts Library holds materials from the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color to a leading collection of bookplates and the Arts of the Book Collection on the history of printing and typography. With a focus on accessibility, the classroom and related materials are not only used by Yale instructors, but also by other regional universities and even the local arts magnet high school. Classes that use the space – over 40 in the past year – typically invite an arts librarian to comment on the materials being discussed. Having the classroom inside the library also allows for a degree of student interaction with sensitive materials that would be impossible otherwise – for example, students are allowed to touch and look at parts of the collection relevant to their work.

Jae and Molly decided to use three classes to highlight the value of special collections resources in teaching, two in Yale College and one at the graduate level. Jessica Helfand’s freshman seminar “Studies in Visual Biography” has a session in the Haas library where students are able to interact with relevant collections. Richard Rose’s college seminar “Art of the Printed Word” uses the Arts of the Book collection to give students exposure to historical bookmaking in advance of their final project of making a book.

Anna Craycroft’s graduate course on painting represents a creative use of special collections where research itself

is treated as an artistic process. In order to accomplish this, the Yale database of finding aids is used, where each set of finding aids is engaged as a depiction of a possible way to think about the collection being represented.  Once again, by having a session in a place where students can have simultaneous access to the database and to the materials themselves, course objectives can be achieved that would otherwise be very difficult.

The Haas Arts Library’s Special Collections can suit a variety of needs, and Jae and Molly pointed out the class programs can be tailored to match the level of the students being taught.  Since librarians are almost always involved in the class, students may also explore the collections from a perspective they may not have been exposed to previously.  Even with the growing number of classes using the Special Collections, librarians are still happy to help professors set up a class at Haas.  For more information, email Jae Rossman directly, at least a week in advance of the desired classroom date.  For frequently asked questions, see the Special Collections’ access policies page here.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below
(note a slight delay upon initial playback):