Liberal Arts Library Collections Help Students Succeed

Colleges and universities often have special liberal arts library collections that can benefit student achievement.

Academic libraries play a vital role at colleges and universities. They collect and maintain the resources students need to complete their coursework. Larger institutions, especially research universities like Ivy League schools, have the ability to build particularly impressive collections of books, journals, and other forms of media. Those collections, in turn, support the research of students and teachers at those schools, as well as scholars from around the world.

Colleges and universities often have highly varied library collections, from basic materials for introductory courses to more specialized resources. Many schools have rare materials that require special maintenance or preservation, such as the Juilliard Manuscript Collection, which contains over a hundred historical music manuscripts from famous composers. These special collections, many of which support liberal arts education, can give students an up-close look at the subjects they study.

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Academic Library Collections and Student Achievement

A strong library collection presents many research opportunities for students, which can help them achieve success in their studies. Special collections containing rare materials can be particularly important for academic research because they allow students to study their topics in more detail. Many schools encourage teachers to incorporate special collections into their courses, and some even offer students rewards for using the college’s library resources in their research.

Yale University has many highly regarded academic programs and strong library collections to support them. Its library website offers teachers examples of how to incorporate the school’s many special library and museum collections into their curricula to give students a deeper understanding of the course subjects. Yale also recently created a graduate certificate program, Material Histories of the Human Record, that allows students to work directly with primary sources for their research by utilizing the special collections of rare historical materials Yale has collected.

Yale takes its dedication to using library collections in its academic programs a step further by offering students prizes for incorporating research materials from Yale’s library collections. The Diane Kaplan Memorial Senior Essay Prize is awarded each year to three outstanding senior essays based on research found in any of the university’s special library collections.

Wellesley College also rewards students for exceptional research using library resources. Its Student Library Research Award is given annually to students whose papers or projects make extensive, creative use of diverse library resources and collections.

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Library Collections in the Classroom

Yale’s Material Histories of the Human Record program is an excellent example of how colleges and universities can use library resources in their classrooms to help student achievement. Other schools have also found ways to use their special collections to give students a hands-on experience to enhance their understanding of various topics.

At Stanford University, a history student was able to analyze an actual manuscript from the Middle Ages at the university’s library, which allowed the student to see up close how scribes used to handwrite documents.

At the University of North Carolina, an English and comparative literature PhD student accessed rare editions of Frank O’Hara’s poetry books for her research, and a teacher was able to read from real cuneiform tablets.

Cornell University has numerous special library collections, but its Hip Hop Collection has attracted a lot of attention. The collection preserves over 250,000 artifacts documenting the origins and spread of hip-hop culture, including thousands of sound and video recordings, hundreds of party and event flyers, artwork, photographs, books, magazines, and more, with additional archival materials being added all the time.

The initial materials of the Hip Hop Collection were donated to Cornell in 2007, and it has grown significantly since. Author Johan Kugelberg had collected several thousand artifacts for a book about the early days of hip-hop and then wanted to give what he had collected to a museum or library. He chose Cornell because of the school’s track record of public access and top-notch archival facilities.

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The collection offers a cross-disciplinary learning experience for students, covering music history, art history, dance history, fashion, Africana studies, and many more topics. It is used in different university courses at Cornell to give students the ability to see and interact with valuable artifacts of the subjects they study.

Dr. Riché Richardson, a professor of African American literature in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center, uses the collection in her Beyoncé Nation course, which studies the life and career of the famous artist through a multidisciplinary lens. During the course, collection specialist Ben Ortiz introduces Richardson’s students to the collection to help them understand that hip-hop is a multifaceted discourse.

The collection is also used in two different music courses, Performing Hip Hop and Hip Hop in Global Perspective, taught by Associate Professor of Music Catherine Appert, a specialist in ethnomusicology. Appert believes the collection is not only foundational for studying hip-hop history, but it also serves as a useful tool for teaching students proper research practices.

Many other colleges and universities have special library collections like Cornell and Yale, which are influenced by and contribute to the strength of the academic programs at those schools. They give students access to specialized information and rare artifacts that grant students greater insight into the subjects they study to help them succeed.

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