A new exhibition featuring material from Catholic University’s Rare Books Collection is now open in Mullen Library’s May Gallery. Devotion in Print: Catholic Women and Their Books, 1500-1800 explores women’s roles in transforming the written and printed word in the early modern era across multiple genres and disciplines. Far from being passive observers and consumers, Read More

September 26, 1923 marked the opening of lectures for the 1923-24 academic year at Catholic University. Students hustled between classes in McMahon and Caldwell Halls, on what may have seemed a typical start to a new semester. But on this particular day, a new School opened on campus – the School of Canon Law. Since Read More

Every year, on the week of the 22nd day of September, the passionate community of J.R.R. Tolkien’s enthusiasts gather together all around the world to pay tribute to the creator of Middle-earth. This date wasn’t selected arbitrarily. On September 22nd,  Bilbo and Frodo famously celebrate their concurrent birthday in the first chapter of The Lord Read More

A previous blog post recounted CatholicU’s Gilded Age and Progressive Era Labor Collections, part of Special Collections that includes materials from the New Deal and Postwar Era. These include the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1935-1955; three high ranking CIO officials, Phillip Murray, John Brophy, and Harry C. Read; and Joseph Daniel Keenan of the Read More

WORKERS: Exploring Labor in the Strishock Print Collection  is an online exhibition resulting from the collaborative work between students in the Art History Department at Catholic University and Special Collections. The idea of working collaboratively was central to my course Museum & Gallery Practices Today, which introduces students to various aspects of gallery and museum practices through a participatory methodology that seeks to foster collaboration, creativity, and criticality.

In Special Collections, we’ve dressed in our grandest greens to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. In that spirit, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some books in our collection which are a lot more prepared than us to celebrate the Irish saint’s day, such as these books from our Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry collection, housed Read More

It is difficult for the twenty-first century mind to grasp the endless drudgery of the daily lives of nineteenth century workers, especially the masses of the poor, and particularly women. While the status of mother or wife was better than that of domestic servant, there was little else separating them from the constant toil of Read More

Since our last update on our long-term conservation project, Special Collections staff has continued addressing the conservation and access challenges in the Catholic University’s Rare Books collection. As “Part I” and “Part II” of the conservation blog posts reported, our work with our partner Quarto Conservation has focused on books that varied in date range Read More

Our guest blogger is Rebecca Lemon, a Library and Information Science (LIS) student at Catholic University. Last semester, as part of my Library and Information Science (LIS) coursework, I had the opportunity to arrange and process two small, related collections, the National Right to Life News Collection and the Long Island Pro-Life Collection , housed Read More

Earlier this summer, this humble archivist was minding his own business, when who should walk into my world but trouble – cold, metal trouble… While performing a standard inventory review in one of our storage rooms, I noticed a large metallic object on a shelf that was hidden behind a piece of furniture. Naturally I Read More