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We are happy to announce a new addition to our collections: the Carolyn Grassi Papers!

This collection presents a unique look into the personal and professional life of a local poet.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Carolyn Grassi walked many avenues in life before dedicating herself as a full-time poet. As a young woman, Grassi was a member of the Maryknoll Sisters, a Catholic institute where she practiced meditation and worked among disadvantaged communities in New York. After leaving the Maryknoll Sisters to marry Joseph Grassi, moving to California, and having two sons, Grassi earned a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Public Administration at SJSU. She taught political science and philosophy courses at several California community colleges and also worked with Stanford Research Institute International, as Director of Continuing Education for Santa Clara University, and in various consulting roles.

Carolyn Grassi finally heeded the call to poetry in the 1980s, encouraged by Naomi Clark of Poetry Center San José and others. To date, she has published six books of poetry. The latest, Memories and Meditations, was released just last July. Her writing has won her an Ingram Merrill Foundation Writing Grant Award and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry. As a poet, Grassi has led numerous workshops and readings with Poetry Center San José and other organizations across the country.

One strength of the collection is Grassi’s extensive correspondence, primarily made up of connections she forged in seeking the support of fellow writers, publishers, and friends. Her correspondence reflects the difficulty of finding an audience, editors, and publishing opportunities as an independent poet, featuring rejection letters and frank discussion of the frustration and doubt that many writers experience. That said, Grassi’s professional outreach sometimes developed into colorful personal friendships that fostered her creative spirit. Her letters offer up her personality as much as they reveal the challenges of pursuing poetry as a career.

Last April, materials from this collection were showcased in our exhibit San José State University’s Legacy of Poetry. Among these was a draft of Grassi’s poem “Celibacy,” later published in her book Transparencies. The poem was originally written in the 1980s and submitted for a course she audited under poet Robert Hass. A handwritten note on one draft highlights the revision process: the poem went through ten drafts before reaching its published form. All ten of these drafts are preserved in her papers.

The collection also features a variety of other items that shed light on Grassi’s writing process. Galley proofs of some of her books contain detailed edits and comments made by Grassi and others. Likewise, her correspondence contains feedback on her poetry from friends and mentors. Early poetry journals and drafts of stories provide further insights into Grassi’s creative development, her meditative and sincere style, and her deeply curious approach to life.

Beyond her poetry, Grassi’s personal reflections and wide-ranging essays offer intimate windows into her experiences and worldview. The collection highlights many areas of Grassi’s interests -- from politics to spirituality, from the foreign to the familiar -- and the ways in which she interweaves them in her life as well as in her poetry.

The Carolyn Grassi Papers have truly been a pleasure to work with and I warmly invite you to explore them yourself.

To view materials from this collection, please make an appointment by contacting us at special.collections@sjsu.edu.

Post written by Alona Hazen, Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant.

We are happy to announce a new addition to our collections: the San José State University Asian American Studies Records!

As a result of the Third World Liberation Front movement of 1968, a proposal for the creation of an Asian American Studies Program at San José State University was spearheaded by student participants of the Progressive Asian American Coalition (PAAC), members of Associated Students, and faculty members in 1969. In Fall 1970, the program was formally established, residing under the School of Social Sciences. During the mid to late 1970s, the Asian American Studies Program faced a number of "cutback struggles" in regards to budget allocations and diminished faculty and staff, and this has remained a pattern throughout later years as well. The Asian American Studies Program frequently collaborated with related organizations, namely the student-led Asian Students In Action Now (A.S.I.A.N., also known as Asian Club), to organize events and activities such as the Asian Spring Festival. Throughout the years, there were many who acted as Program Coordinator: PJ Hirabayashi, Gregory Mark, and most notably, Raymond Lou. From Spring 1979 until around 1990, Raymond Lou, previously a lecturer of Asian American Studies, was selected as the next Program Coordinator. As Program Coordinator, Raymond Lou participated in university-wide efforts such as the Interminority Coalition (also known as the Interminority Council) and Student Affirmative Action. Around 1982, there was discussion of reorganizing the School of Social Sciences, as the ethnic programs were not under their own department, but rather as individual programs under the school. In 1987, the Department of Social Sciences was formally established with the purpose of functioning as a consortium made up of the component programs: Afro-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies, Social Science, and Women's Studies. Today, Asian American Studies resides in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences under the College of Social Sciences.

Come check out this collection and its importance to SJSU’s ethnic studies initiatives!

Post authored by Christine Thuy Minh Nguyen (MSLIS ‘26). 

Our new exhibit, San José State University’s Legacy of Poetry, is located on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Curated by Student Assistant Alona Hazen in honor of National Poetry Month, the exhibit features the works and lives of poets who have walked SJSU’s campus since its beginnings. Whether student or faculty (or both!), these poets have contributed to a legacy over a century strong and thriving. 

Student Jean Holloway (above, 1938) and Professor Esther Shephard (below, 1941) pictured as members of the Pegasus Literary Society in the university's La Torre yearbooks.

I was especially excited to be able to highlight two women who were part of SJSU’s community in the 1930s and 40s: student Jean Holloway and professor Esther Shephard. Their materials can be seen in the cases near the elevators. Both women pursued poetry primarily as a hobby, led professional lives centered on writing as an art, and were active members of our university via various clubs and organizations. 

Jean Holloway, born Gratia Jean Casey, attended San José State in the late 1930s. She was an active member of several university clubs, including the Pegasus Literary Society, the Radio Speaking Society, and the San José Players. Poetry was just one of Holloway’s creative outlets, though she excelled at it and won many awards in her time as a student. Her poems range in subject from the everyday to the fantastical and in tone from the anxious to the whimsical.

A talented writer, Holloway’s radio scripts aired on San José’s local station, KQW, and on San Francisco’s local station, KYA, while she was a student. Her writing pursuits led her to become a scriptwriter for radio, film, and television in Hollywood from the 1940s through the 1970s. Holloway made her professional break into radio when she was hired to work on The Kate Smith Show by Ted Collins, leaving San José State as a sophomore. She later contracted with the studio MGM, for which she wrote three musical films. Holloway primarily wrote for television from the 1950s on, writing over 500 episodes of television’s first long-running daytime soap opera, The First Hundred Years.

Esther Shephard, born Esther Maria Lofstrand, was a professor in San José State’s English Department from 1939 until 1959. During her time at the university, Shephard participated in numerous poetry readings and talks, judged student literary competitions, and often worked with clubs such as the English Club and the Free-lance Writing Club. As El Portal had been discontinued during World War II, Shephard was a founding advisor of its successor, The Reed, in 1948. Shephard continued to advise the Pegasus Literary Society, which sponsored Reed, after her retirement.

Shephard began her career as a high school teacher in Montana before deciding to attend the University of Washington after the death of her first husband. She earned her Ph.D. there in 1938. Shephard’s dissertation, Walt Whitman’s Pose, was published that same year. She would continue to focus on the renowned poet throughout her career. Another of her achievements was the retelling of the ancient Chinese legend The Cowherd and the Sky Maiden, published in 1950 and later staged as an opera at Shephard’s alma mater. Shephard’s work also included one-act plays and Paul Bunyan, a collection of logging camp stories. 

Dr. Henry Meade Bland teaching class outside San José State Teachers College, 1929.

In the upper cases of our foyer, I created a timeline of university poets, accompanying University Archivist Carli Lowe’s exhibit on Faricita Hall Wyatt, an amazing SJSU alum who also published her own poetry. Far from definitive, the timeline cases offer just a sample of the poetry written by SJSU students and faculty over the last century. Love, loss, and contemplation find their expression here, perhaps offering connection and even hope to readers. 

More than a legacy of individual poets, this is a legacy of community. 

Dr. Henry Meade Bland, poet laureate and professor of English, had a role in the establishment of The Quill, a student publication which continues today as the award-winning Reed Magazine. His impact as a founding member of our university’s legacy of poetry cannot be understated and was certainly appreciated by his students, who continued to honor him after his death. 

A more recent thread of connection on display highlights the continuing influence poetic friendships and mentorship have on our community. Sandra McPherson was featured during SJSU’s Contemporary Poetry Festival in 1977, as was poet Robert Bly. Bly was influential for poet Nils Peterson, featured a few cases down. Inspiringly, these connections went far beyond our campus, as Peterson and Naomi Clark showed in founding Poetry Center San José, an organization which seeks to “nurture…diverse literary expression” to this day.

Exhibit case near the fifth floor elevators, 2024.

Given the limitations of the space available for the exhibit, it was difficult to choose materials that would not only display well, but that would truly reflect the rich history of poetry we have in the archive. I chose to focus on poets who either attended or worked at SJSU, though this left out many materials we have relating to poets from across the country and even around the world. Notable poets whose works I did not feature include Charles Bukowski, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, Czesław Miłosz, and Ezra Pound, among others. Admittedly, SJSU itself has been home to more poets than could be featured in this exhibit. The English Department’s extensive efforts to preserve our university’s Legacy of Poets can be found here.

To view materials from our collections, please make an appointment by contacting us at special.collections@sjsu.edu. Collections featured in this exhibit include the Student Publications Collection, the Jean Holloway Papers, the Esther Shephard Papers, the Carolyn Grassi Papers (in process), and the Virginia de Araujo Papers (yet to be processed). We welcome you to search for other poetry materials via our Online Archive of California finding aids, notably that of the Poetry Journals and Chapbooks Collection.  

Additionally, a number of poetry books are held in our Rare Books Collection and can be searched via the university library’s OneSearch. To narrow your search to items held by the Special Collections & Archives, please filter “location” to the various “Special Collections” options on the left hand side of the page. 

Post written by Alona Hazen, Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant.

A Scholar, An Activist: Selections from the Harry Edwards Papers is located in the SJSU Special Collections & Archives Reading Room on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. This exhibition features documents, journals, artifacts, and more donated from Dr. Harry Edwards. His career as a sociologist and professional sports consultant has deeply impacted the culture of inclusion and representation of Black Athletes.

A distinguished professor and dedicated proponent of civil rights, Dr. Harry Edwards’ first came to San Jose State College. Here he excelled as an honor student on the basketball and track and field teams until his graduation in 1964. Afterwards he received his Master’s in Sociology from Cornell University before returning to SJSC as an instructor.

Along with then Sociology graduate student, Kenneth Noel, they founded the United Black Students for Action, an organization to fight against the discrimination of Black students, especially those in the Athletics Department. After gaining traction and hosting the Black Youth Conference in Los Angeles, the movement gained national renown after voting to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The Olympics Committee for Human Rights was formed, culminating in the famous black power salute on the podium by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Dr. Edwards continued his work as a professor and activist at UC Berkeley after he received his PhD in Sociology. Over the years, he guest lectured at numerous campuses and wrote several books, including The Revolt of the Black Athlete in the immediate aftermath of the Olympic Games.

In the 1980s, Dr. Edwards also began working as a consultant to many professional sports organizations. He developed programs to create better conditions and promote minoritized groups for the Golden State Warriors and Major League Baseball. His longest partnership was as a staff consultant to the San Francisco 49ers, where he worked closely with former coach, Bill Walsh.

The events of his life reflect the changes towards progress for Black Athletes throughout the nation. It can inform our understanding of where we have been and what actions are needed to continue seeking a better, more equitable culture.

To view the other materials in the Harry Edwards Papers, please make an appointment by contacting us at special.collections@sjsu.edu. 

For more information about the Civil Rights Movement at San Jose State College in the 1960s, please refer to our other collections, San José State University Civil Rights and Campus Protest Collection and the San Jose State College "Speed City" Collection. 

Post written by Eilene Lueck, Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant.

We are happy to announce a new addition to our collections: the Sisterspirit Records!

Sisterspirit Bookstore was founded in 1984 by four women who originally met at San Jose State – Mary Jeffrey, Marilyn Cook, Karen Hester, and Amy Caffrey with the goal of creating a feminist bookstore and coffeehouse where women could socialize and enjoy live music. The group’s mission statement was: “To promote women’s culture and community in the South Bay Area, to help unify and strengthen the South Bay women’s community and provide a multicultural information center to enable networking with other women’s groups and communities. To develop and promote educational projects responsive to human, civil, and women’s rights. To teach and promote women’s culture by providing a meeting place for all women, by providing space and support for local women’s artistic works, by providing information on women’s history, women’s music, women’s literature, etc. by providing a women’s bookstore and coffeehouse. To work in solidarity with other women’s organizations on projects and events which support women’s issues and culture.” By 1985, Sisterspirit became a fully-fledged non-profit organization, selling books and records by mail.

In 1986, Sisterspirit joined with the Billy DeFrank Center and opened a physical bookstore, in which they held regular coffeehouses with live music or author book-signings. Sisterspirit also sold books for students at San Jose State University. Most importantly, Sisterspirit became a space for women and LGBTQ+ people in San Jose, one of the very few feminist bookstores in the South Bay. At Sisterspirit's height, the bookstore was open seven days a week, with over 5,000 titles, along with 40 regular volunteers. 

However, by the early 2000s, Sisterspirit had lost much of their support. With an on-going recession and the South Bay rapidly becoming more expensive, it became harder to get volunteers and to keep their space at the Billy DeFrank Center. Moreover, many of the books that were once exclusive to Sisterspirit could be bought online or at chain bookstores. By August 2010, Sisterspirit closed, selling off the last of their materials and donating the money to Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Sisterspirit was the only bookstore in the United States to be run for over two decades by an all volunteer staff. 

This collection consists of 11 boxes of administrative/business records, photographs, book-signing and performance material, book-selling information, meeting minutes, financial records, and framed materials. Also includes posters, broadsides,stickers, buttons, and other realia.

Post written by Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant Elena Castaneda, who was also responsible for processing the Sisterspirit Records.

Sources: 

https://www.queersiliconvalley.org/sisterspirit-story/  

https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/08/30/san-jose-lesbians-and-feminists-mourn-loss-of-sisterspirit-books 

For the past two weeks, I have been participating in La Sfera Challenge II, an international competition between teams of scholars to transcribe manuscripts of La Sfera, Goro Dati’s 15^th-century Italian schoolbook on cosmography and geography. For the contest, each of the five teams raced to transcribe their unique manuscript of the text, which are all held at different repositories. The goal of the project is to transcribe various copies of the same text so that scholars can eventually create an English translation and modern scholarly bilingual edition. This crowd-sourced and open-access project has been made possible through the support of the IIIF Consortium, FromThePage and Stanford Libraries. It has been organized by historian Laura Morreale, who is an independent scholar who works in medieval Italian and digital humanities, and does so much to keep people participating in these fields. 

My team, Team Spencer, transcribed a (ahem) well-worn version held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (Pryce MS P4). Our intrepid captains—Laura Ingallinella (Mellon Post-doctoral fellow at Wellesley), Karen Severud Cook (Special Collections Librarian at Spencer Research Library), N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library)—used Twitter to recruit our team of Italianists, paleographers and medievalists from around the world to participate in the challenge.

I have already seen brilliant comments from other participants about technical details of the individual manuscripts, especially the scripts and the fabulous maps that decorate the pages (see resources at end of the post). However, for me, this contest really reflects the potential to use social media (in this case, Twitter) to create and facilitate scholarly communities. I joined the contest because one of our team captains, Laura Ingallinella, tagged me as a potential participant in a tweet. To be honest, I was initially a bit apprehensive: while my academic background is in medieval Italian literature and I now work in SJSU archives, my research did not involve transcribing manuscripts and my paleographical skills are self-taught. With just the teensiest little nudge, though, I was on board. 

Screenshot of my transcription-in-progress of a page from La Sfera Challenge II.

What I really loved about this project (besides it dovetailing with so many of my interests: early Italian! manuscripts! archives!) was the way that it brought people together during what has often been a rather isolated time of working from home. During the contest, we tweeted about our manuscript (#TeamSpencer and #LaSferaChallenge2), and had a great deal of fun collaborating on the transcription itself. In the team log, members wrote color-coded notes about their folios, asked questions, and encouraged each other. Publicly, on the team page and on Twitter, members shared their progress and their discoveries from working closely with the document. Laura Ingallinella paid close attention to variations in the script, and found evidence that the scribe may have been using more than one manuscript to prepare our copy. Kıvılcım Yavuz discovered that the scribe had missed a few whole stanzas of the treatise—which had not been previously noted! Karen Severud Cook has been compiling and identifying the geographical places in the text and maps. Moreover, because there were teams working at the same time on different manuscripts of this same text, we were able to see and compare highlights. The manuscripts all have different physical qualities and conditions, were written in different types of 15^th-century Italian scripts, and have differing degrees of illumination (decorated initials, maps, diagrams, etc.).

As I was telling a friend about the project the other night, she remarked that this is exactly the kind of thing that everyone hoped the internet would let us do. Personally, it has been so much fun for me to contribute to the La Sfera Project as an Italianist and to practice paleography, but much of the value is also in making new connections, learning from experts, and feeling like part of a community. 

Lastly, I’d like to share resources about this project as a model for creating academic engagement while we are ‘working from home,’ but also more general resources that the SJSU community can use for research and teaching on related subjects. 

General Resources

FromThePage: Software for crowdsourced transcription projects. Individual researchers and organizations can upload scanned documents to be transcribed. Images can be moved and magnified, while being transcribed. I can attest that it is easy to use! You can create a free account to help institutions transcribe archival materials from medieval manuscripts to contemporary letters. 

Italian Paleography. This resource is a collaboration created by the Newberry Library in Chicago, the University of Toronto and St. Louis University. It offers a wealth of information about the study of early Italian vernacular scripts, giving background information, digitized images of manuscripts, and pages where you can practice transcription. 

La Sfera Challenge II & the Spencer manuscript

La Sfera Challenge Website: The project website has information and updates from the project organizers for both challenges, including a bibliography and resources. The site also has pages for the individual teams with blogposts about their manuscripts, like this one for Team Spencer. 

On Twitter: To follow the findings of the project, search #LaSferaChallenge and #LaSferaChallenge2. You can also follow individual teams, like #TeamSpencer

Team Member Research:  New findings about the manuscript are already being shared publicly on institutional websites. Karen Severud Cook, the Special Collections Librarian at the Spencer Library, has been working on this particular manuscript for several years and published on it in the past. 

Karen Severud Cook. Blog Post: “La Sfera, A 15th Century Schoolbook” (Oct. 19, 2015)

Karen Severud Cook. “Dati’s Sfera: The Manuscript Copy in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.” Mediterranean Studies 11 (2002): 45-70. 

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz. Blog Post: “To Transcribe or not to Transcribe, That is Not the Question” (July 28, 2020). 

Manuscripts and Early Italian at SJSU Special Collections

Illuminated Manuscript Collection (MSS 2015.01.20): The Illuminated Manuscript Collection consists of six color illuminated manuscripts and an informational guide. The 14^th and 15^th-century fragments from European manuscripts include pages from a book of hours, a musical score and missals. There is also a page from an illuminated 19^th or 20^th-century Persian manuscript. See: Illuminated Manuscript Collection Finding Aid

Manuscript Facsimiles: There are several high-quality copies of medieval manuscripts that are available for research in the reading room, including the Vernon Manuscript and Marie de Medici’s Book of Hours. See: Facsimiles LibGuide

Early Italian Texts: There are several early Italian printed books in our collections, including several on architecture and a 16th-century copy of Achille Marozzo’s Opera nova chiamata duello, an Italian treatise on fencing. They may be found using faceted searches of the library catalog, but there is also a resource guide that has a chronological list of our rare books and a partial annotated bibliography. See: Rare Books and Manuscripts LibGuide  

Here at SJSU Archives and Special Collections, we are excited to connect you with resources about manuscripts, paleography and medieval or early modern studies. If you would like to learn more or access materials for your research and/or teaching, please don’t be a stranger. Contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu

Did you know that SJSU Archives and Special Collections has a historic collection of hundreds of fine art prints that can be accessed in the Reading Room (by appointment, once we are open again) and used in your classes? No?! That might be because it has only been available again since January…but it is true!

History of the Collection. The prints in the Humanities Art Collection (MSS 2019.07.08) were bought by the library for art and humanities instruction and reference from the early twentieth century until the 1980s, but have only recently been made accessible again. The majority were acquired and used by the campus community for decades, but the old card catalog records were never transferred to the library’s electronic databases. Those acquired before the early-1980s could be viewed in the Art Reading Room in the old North Library building, and were stored in what was essentially a broom closet known colloquially as the ‘Treasure Room.’ When the Clark Library opened in 1982, the old North Library became part of the Walquist Library Complex, and the Special Collections Department moved into a larger space on the 3^rd floor. In the 1980s, library and arts faculty continued to purchase and donate new prints to the collection. While it is likely that the majority of the prints were transferred or acquired by the Special Collections Department by that time, it is possible that a small number of prints may have been still circulating as part of the ‘Media Department’ collection, a set of filing cabinets on the 2^nd floor of the Clark Library, and then transferred when the libraries moved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in 2003.  

When the library moved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, the prints were put into oversized filing cabinets in the vaults of Special Collections & Archives, where they remained virtually untouched until last year. Since there were so many unhoused oversized materials, the reading room staff decided to inventory the drawers to begin working through the backlog. When I started going through the first drawers and came across a signed Matisse print, it became clear that processing this collection needed to be a priority! 

From July 2019 to January 2020, I rehoused the prints in large-format archival folders, identified the artist and title, and organized them as an archival collection. While many had information written on their paper frames, some were identifiable from acquisition slips, and others required more research using the image and signature. Those that were library-mounted on paper frames and cardstock were protected by either interleaving them with acid free paper or removing them from the frames, and then housing them in archival folders. Making this collection cataloged and accessible has been painstaking work, but it is enormously satisfying to know that our students and faculty have access to this extraordinary art collection again. 

Collection Highlights. Since this collection of prints was purposefully purchased for studying the arts and humanities, it is wide-ranging in its scope and content. It has a representative sampling of different genres of prints such as fine art prints, botanical illustrations, and satirical cartoons. The fine art prints reflect major artistic styles with examples of abstract art, expressionism, pop art, realism, and surrealism. 

Pierre Joseph Redouté, Rosa Damascena aurora. Rosier Aurore Loniatowska

Wayne Thiebaud, Street Religion, 1951

While the bulk of the materials are from circa 1750-1980, there are several early European prints, including Old Masters such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Hans Leonhard Schäufelein (1480-1540), Hermans zoon van Rijn Rembrandt (1606-1669), Salvador Rosa (1615-1673) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). 

Albrecht Dürer, John the Baptist and the Saint Onuphrius in the Wilderness. Circa 1503-1504.

A major strength of the collection lies in its large number of satirical 18^th and 19^th-century English prints. There are full sets of William Hogarth’s print series and illustrations, ‘Industry and Idleness,’ ‘A Harlot’s Progress,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ and ‘Hudibras,’ as well as many other individual engravings. 

William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness: Apprentices at their Looms. Plate I. 1747

Lastly, the collection was intended to represent major types of printmaking, including relief (wood cut and wood engraving), intaglio (engraving and etching), lithography and screen printing. Many of these are especially interesting for learning and teaching about technical aspects of print making and art history. For example, this Edgar Degas print is from a cancelled plate, meaning that it has fine lines drawn through the original etching to indicate it was not part of the original edition: 

Edgar Degas, Manet Seated, Turned to the Right.

This historic print collection offers so many avenues for enriching humanities and arts teaching and research at SJSU. We are thrilled to make these prints publicly accessible again and are looking forward to seeing how our campus community will use them.

Access. This collection has not yet been digitized, but there is a detailed Finding Aid available online with an item-level catalog of the prints with artist, title, year and any notes (such as technique or condition). The finding aid is arranged in series by geographical origin (Asia, Europe, North and South America, Unknown), and then by the nationality of the artist. While the reading room is still closed due to Covid-19 and staff only has limited access to the vaults, we can answer research questions about the collection and individual prints. Once in-person access has recommenced, the physical collection can be studied in the Reading Room and/or reserved for class showings. Please contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu for more information.

Post written by Monica Keane.

The current Covid-19 shutdown of the SJSU campus is just the latest chapter in the history of SJSU’s libraries, but it is revealing something to the public that librarians have always known: the library is not just a physical building that holds books! The remote access to collections and services that SJSU library is providing during the shutdown would not have even been possible a generation ago, but this is just the latest manifestation of the ways that SJSU libraries have changed over the years. 

The SJSU library has been housed in many different buildings throughout its history, but also has always been a reflection the collective work of many different people. Our first librarian, Ruth Royce, led the library from 1881-1918 after the Second Normal School Building was built.

NORMAL SCHOOL FACULTY, 1892

In these early years, librarians and other staff would have brought materials to students from locked cases. As you can see from this 1904 photograph from our collections, the library reading rooms were popular places to study!

1904 READING ROOM

From the 1910 to 1941, the library was housed in the third Normal School Building, which brought changes to the ways that students and staff accessed materials. There were still reading rooms, but there were also stacks where they could access books after finding them in the card catalogs. Although now SJSU’s library school is online, back when it started in in the 1930s and 40s, it was a popular field of study on campus too. 

1941 STACKS, and 1941 CARD CATALOG, and 1941 LIBRARIANSHIP STUDENTS

1942 brought the opening of the Wahlquist Library, which was eventually demolished to make way for the current library, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in 2000. However, for part of that history (1982-2003), there was also a second library building, the Clark Library, which is now Clark Hall. This period saw the development of new technologies such as microfilm, but also the openness that is more characteristic of library services today. 

WAHLQUIST CENTRAL BUILDING, 1958, and CLARK LIBRARY MICROFILM, 1982, and MOBILE BOOK STAND, 1967

In 2003, the library moved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, as part of a unique partnership between SJSU and the San Jose Public Library. With 8 floors and 475,000 square feet, it holds over 1.6 million volumes, but offers much more in digital collections and services. 

The Archives and Special Collections department began in the Clark Library in the early 1980s, but our collections include materials from the inception of the library. The digitized photos in this blog post are only the tip of the iceberg! Not only do we have many more physical photos and undigitized archival materials, but many of our rare books and artworks were transferred from the main library collections over the years. SJSU Archives & Special Collections staff has remote access to our internal catalogs of physical materials, as well as knowledge of our unique holdings that have been developed through years of experience. We may not be on the fifth floor with our collections right now, but we’re still available to answer your questions about them by emailing special.collections@sjsu.edu.

Resources: 

Historical Images of The Library: a LibGuide with selected images documenting the library’s history from our digital collections

SJSU King Library Digital Collections: to find more images of SJSU’s historical libraries, student and staff, try searching keywords such as ‘librarians’ and ‘libraries,’ as well as specific names or buildings. 

Suggested SJSU Archival Collections for further research: San José State University Library Records(MSS.2009.03.03), Willard O. Mishoff Library Science Literature Collection (MSS.2010.11.15), San José State University School of Library and Information Science Records (MSS.2015.06.01), San José State University and the San José Public Library System Joint Library Project Records (MSS.2009.08.05)

Post written by Monica Keane, SJSU MLIS '20.

As the COVID-19 epidemic has us sheltering at home, we all miss the familiar places on campus where we could connect with one another. What better way to reminisce with our shared history at SJSU than searching through old images of campus life with SJSU King Library Digital Collections? Our digital portal lets you search for archival images of our campus and library, including art from student publications. 

Since we are all looking for ways to connect with one another, I have made a free coloring book from a student publication from the early 20^th century, The Old Familiar Places. It consists of a series of woodcut prints that students made of their favorite landmarks on campus, including the iconic SJSU Tower Hall. Built in 1910, this Spanish Revival building is the oldest building on campus. Some of the others are no longer in existence—and your own list of favorite places might include several that would not be built for decades! 

Please share your own versions with us! If you would like to color the images, right click them to save to your computer and then print. Or use them as inspiration to create your own artwork of your favorite places on campus. Tag us on Instagram #sjsuspecialcollections or on Twitter @SJSUSpeccoll

Link to Familiar Places Digital Collection Images

Citation: San José State University Archives Photograph Collection, MSS-2006-05-01. San José State University Library Special Collections and Archives.

Finding Aid: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt967nd18r/

Post authored by recent SJSU MLIS graduate Monica Keane.