Gleeson Library’s Special Collections are housed in the Donohue Rare Book Room, and feature more than 17,000 items including books, manuscripts, photographs, drawings, engravings, and other artworks. But you don’t have to come to the library to look at some of our collections — you can visit the library’s digital collections online!
Each month, we add new images and digitized documents to our digital collections. In November 2022, we added 69 new items to our Woman Suffrage Collection. The Woman Suffrage Collection now has a total of 847 digitized items. We also added 12 digitized books to our Rare Book Collection, including early printed books on astronomy, natural history, Jesuit descriptions of China, a French engraved book of hours, and a Souvenir of the silver jubilee of the Sacred Heart Presentation Convent.
Here is a list of titles for the newly digitized books in digital collections:
- Institutio astronomica by Pierre Gassendi (1653)
- In sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentarius by Christopher Clavius (1591)
- Les Fables D’Esope Phrygien (1645)
- The history of that great and renowned monarchy of China by Álvaro Semedo (1655)
- Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers, par une sociéte de gens de lettres. Recueil de planches – H-F (1768)
- Heures nouvelles: tirées de la sainte ecriture engravings by Louis Senault (after 1680)
- The crossroads enterprise. Volume 1, number 1 (1953)
- Two men from Bremen (1947)
- Souvenir of the silver jubilee of the Sacred Heart Presentation Convent, San Francisco, California (1894)
- Déclaration presentée au roy d’Angleterre (1621)
- Stanley Morison’s The Craft of Printing: notes on the history of type-forms, etc. (1921)
It’s now easier than ever to browse these large digitized rare books — if you click on the blue bar icon on the right side of your screen, above the page listing, you can ‘View this Item in Mirador.’ A new browser window will open, and you can use the scrollbar at the bottom to quickly preview and select from the page image thumbnails.
All Special Collections materials can be viewed in The Donohue Rare Book Room on the 3rd floor of Gleeson Library. Contact us to set up an appointment.