WThe Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia is a research library that specializes in American history and literature, history of Virginia and the southeastern United States, the history of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, and the history and arts of the book. The library is named after Albert and Shirley Small, who donated substantially to the construction of the library's current building. Albert Small, an alumnus of the University of Virginia, also donated his large personal collection of "autograph documents and rare, early printings of the Declaration of Independence." This collection includes a rare printing of the Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence. Joining the library's existing Dunlap in the Tracy W. McGregor Collection of American History, Small's copy made U.Va. the only American institution with two examples of this, the earliest printing of the nation's founding document. It also includes the only letter written on July 4, 1776, by a signer of the Declaration, Caesar Rodney. The Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection boasts an interactive digital display which allows visitors to view the historical documents electronically, providing access to children and an opportunity for visitors to manipulate the electronic copies without risk of damage to the original work.
WThe Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. The collection at that time consisted of 50,000 volumes of materials on the history of California and the North American West. It is the largest such collection in the world. The building the library is located in, the Doe Annex, was completed in 1950.
WThe Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is the rare book library and literary archive of the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut. Situated on Yale University's Hewitt Quadrangle, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1963. Established by a gift of the Beinecke family and given its own endowment, the library is financially independent from the university and is co-governed by the University Library and Yale Corporation. It is one of the largest buildings in the world entirely dedicated to rare books and manuscripts.
WThe Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is part of the University of Texas Library system in partnership with the Tereza Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS), located in Austin, Texas, and named for the historian and bibliographer, Nettie Lee Benson (1905-1993). It is one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Latin American materials.
WThe Boston Athenæum is one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States. It is also one of a number of membership libraries, for which patrons pay a yearly subscription fee to use Athenæum services. The institution was founded in 1807 by the Anthology Club of Boston, Massachusetts. It is located at 10 1/2 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill.
WThe Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750). The library was established by Henry Clay Folger in association with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger. It opened in 1932, two years after his death.
WHoughton Library, on the south side of Harvard Yard adjacent to Widener Library, is Harvard University's primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. It is part of the Harvard College Library, the library system of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
WThe John Carter Brown Library is an independently funded research library of history and the humanities on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The library's rare book, manuscript, and map collections encompass a variety of topics related to the history of European exploration and colonization of the New World until circa 1825.
WThe L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library is the rare book and manuscript library at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. Founded in 1957 with 1,000 books and 50 manuscript collections, as of 2016 it contained over 300,000 books, 11,000 manuscript collections, and over 2.5 million photographs. Since its inception, the library has been housed in numerous places including the crawl space of a university building and a wholesale grocery warehouse. As of 2016, the special collections library is located on the first floor of the Harold B. Lee Library and is considered to hold "the finest collection of rare books in the Intermountain West and the second finest Mormon collection in existence".
WThe Lilly Library, located on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, is an important rare book and manuscript library in the United States. At its dedication on October 3, 1960, the library contained a collection of 20,000 books, 17,000 manuscripts, more than fifty oil paintings, and 300 prints. Currently, the Lilly Library has 8.5 million manuscripts, 450,000 books, 60,000 comic books, 16,000 mini books, 35,000 puzzles, and 150,000 sheets of music.
WThe Morgan Library & Museum—formerly the Pierpont Morgan Library—is a museum and research library located at 225 Madison Avenue at East 36th Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founded to house the private library of J. P. Morgan in 1906, which included manuscripts and printed books, some of them in rare bindings, as well as his collection of prints and drawings. The library was designed by Charles McKim of the firm of McKim, Mead and White and cost $1.2 million. It was made a public institution in 1924 by J. P. Morgan's son John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., in accordance with his father's will.
WThe Newberry Library is an independent research library, specializing in the humanities and located on Washington Square in Chicago, Illinois. It has been free and open to the public since 1887. Its collections encompass a variety of topics related to the history and cultural production of Western Europe and the Americas over the last six centuries. The Library is named to honor the founding bequest from the estate of philanthropist Walter Loomis Newberry. Core collection strengths support research in several subject areas, including maps, travel, and exploration; music from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century; early contact between Western colonizers and Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere; the personal papers of twentieth-century American journalists; the history of printing; and genealogy and local history.
WThe Rare Book & Manuscript Library is Columbia University's principal repository for special collections. Located in New York City on the university's Morningside Heights campus, its collections span more than 4,000 years, from early Mesopotamia to the present day, and span a variety of formats: cuneiform tablets, papyri, and ostraca, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, early printed books, works of art, posters, photographs, realia, sound and moving image recordings, and born-digital archives. Areas of collecting emphasis include American history, Russian and East European émigré history and culture, Columbia University history, comics and cartoons, philanthropy and social reform, the history of mathematics, human rights advocacy, Hebraica and Judaica, Latino arts and activism, literature and publishing, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, oral history, performing arts, and printing history and the book arts.
WThe Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (RBML) is located on the 3rd floor of the University Library. The library is one of the largest special collections repositories in the United States. Its collections, consisting of over half a million volumes and three kilometers of manuscript material, encompass the broad areas of literature, history, art, theology, philosophy, technology and the natural sciences, and include large collections of emblem books, writings of and works about John Milton, and authors' personal papers.
WThe Ryerson & Burnham Libraries are the art and architecture research collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The libraries cover all periods with extensive holdings in the areas of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century architecture and 19th-century painting, prints, drawings, and decorative arts. A variety of materials important to scholarly research includes architects' diaries, correspondence, job files, photographs, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, articles, transcripts, and personal papers.
WSakya Monastery, also known as Pel Sakya is a Buddhist monastery situated 25 km southeast of a bridge which is about 127 km west of Shigatse on the road to Tingri in Tibet Autonomous Region.
WThe Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is a library in the University of Toronto, constituting the largest repository of publicly accessible rare books and manuscripts in Canada. The library is also home to the university archives which, in addition to institutional records, also contains the papers of many important Canadian literary figures including Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.
WThe UCSF Library is the library of the University of California, San Francisco. It is one of the world's foremost libraries in the health sciences.
WThe William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, an affiliated library of the University of California, Los Angeles, holds rare books and manuscripts with particular strengths in English literature and history (1641–1800), Oscar Wilde and the fin de siècle, and fine press printing. It is located about ten miles southeast from UCLA, in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, and two miles west of the University of Southern California. It is administered by UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, which offers several long- and short-term fellowships for graduate and postdoctoral scholars to use the Library's collections. However, any reader with an interest in the collection is welcome to study.
WThe William L. Clements Library is a rare book and manuscript repository located on the University of Michigan's central campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Specializing in Americana and particularly North American history prior to the twentieth century, the holdings of the Clements Library are grouped into four categories: Books, Manuscripts, Graphics and Maps. The library's collection of primary source materials is expansive and particularly rich in the areas of social history, the American Revolution, and the colonization of North America. The Book collection includes 80,000 rare books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals. Within the other divisions, the library holds 600 atlases, approximately 30,000 maps, 99,400 prints and photographs, 134 culinary periodicals, 20,000 pieces of ephemera, 2,600 manuscript collections, 150 pieces of artwork, 100 pieces of realia, and 15,000 pieces of sheet music.