The smells of library books and historic documents from centuries ago, including a 15th century Babylonian tablet covered in sheep skin, welcome students and faculty members as they enter the Special Collections room in the Ned R. McWherter Library on the University of Memphis campus.
The Special Collections room is located on the fourth floor of the McWherter Library and contains various documents about the Sanitation Strike, the Civil War and Shelby County, as well as other topics. The room also contains the U of M archives and historical pictures and maps of the Tennessee and Memphis area.
In addition to several collections, the room has 25-year-old movable compact shelves containing documents, including photos and clippings from the now-defunct Memphis Press Scimitar.
James Cushing, an archival assistant at Special Collections, said when the newspaper went out of business in the mid-early 1980s, the articles were going to be thrown away, but the newspaper’s employees sifted through them and kept the ones they wanted.
Cushing specializes in biographical records and said students should visit the room because it is a physical part of the past.
“You can actually look at pictures of Dr. King and Dwight Eisenhower,” Cushing said. “You can use it as a primary source to find out a lot of information.”
Cushing also mentioned the Digital Repository that contains pictures of former mayors and other historic figures. The room also contains articles from The Commercial Appeal and The Daily Helmsman and information about the Holiday Inn and John Wilder, a Memphis law school graduate.
The staff is comprised of assistant curators and archivists. Gerald Chaudron is the leader of the department and is in charge of acquisitions, digitization and the preservation program.
Most of the collections are able to be digitized, meaning they can be downloaded for usage outside the library. Cushing said they are in the process of getting a lot of these archives digitized.
“Our main problem before was letting people know what we have, because we have a gold mine over here,” Cushing said. “Dr. Cuadron took over as the archive curator a few years ago, and it’s grown and become more digitalized. It’s coming together slowly but surely.”
Lavender West, a Special Collections student-employee, said most of the time, these collections are donated, but there are other ways they come about obtaining them.
“Other times, we’ll buy collections or objects to complete a collection we have,” West said. “We also trade collections with other schools occasionally.”
RaSean Jenkins, a senior history major, said he discovered Special Collections while doing research about Memphis’ history. He said his findings about the Sanitation Strike were the most interesting.
“While doing research with Dr. [Aram] Goudsouzian, I found the collection of interviews with the 1968 Strike that I conducted over three months of research with MLK50,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins said he thinks every student should visit Special Collections because, besides being an interesting place, it also contains interviews and articles that cannot be found anywhere else.
Special Collections is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays. The room is closed on Saturdays. Students who want to access digital versions of certain collections can email the library at lib_sc@memphis.edu.
