Several previous blog posts have highlighted select rare book acquisitions via purchase on an annual basis since the department joined Special Collections in 2019. The most recent reporting year, which ended April 30, 2023, saw three very significant additions. This was assisted in part by the welcome promotion of Alex Audziayuk from Rare Books Technician, 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.

Kentucky born Karl Michael Schmitt (1922- ), a recent centenarian and alumnus of Catholic University, is a distinguished scholar and teacher on Latin American studies. Special Collections, which includes University Archives, is fortunate to have a small but important collection of Dr. Schmitt’s materials, mostly photographs, documenting his World War II era time on campus, Read More

Our guest blogger is Elyse Ridder, a graduate student in the joint program for Musicology (MA) and Library & Information Science (MLIS) at the Catholic University of America, and a student employee in the Catholic University Special Collections. One of the biggest projects I have been privileged to work on as a student employee at Read More

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

Our guest blogger is Elyse Ridder, a graduate student in the joint program for Musicology (MA) and Library & Information Science (MLIS) at the Catholic University of America, and a student employee in the CUA Special Collections. During my time as a student employee at the Catholic University Special Collections, I have explored a few Read More

What drives an artist to create?  For the viewer of the drawing, painting, or sculpture, mystery often surrounds the creative process. It is also true that what motivates an artist varies amongst artists. For Dony Mac Manus, Lecturer of Drawing and Sculpture in the Department of Art, Rome School of Music, Drama, and Art and the University’s first Artist in Residence, the starting point is often a commission for a work of liturgical art. Like many artists, he develops his ideas first through sketches 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

Encountering a book once owned, signed, or inscribed by a distinguished person, is in some way encountering the person who signed it or closing the distance to only “a few handshakes away”. Holding the very same volume, read by someone we admire, turning the same pages, can become a transformative and inspirational experience. Books such Read More