Special collections are collections of manuscripts, rare books, artifacts, audiovisual materials, and other items that provide original and often firsthand insight into history. They range from diaries and correspondence to official government records, from scrapbooks to newspapers, and from parchment to compact discs.
Areas of collecting strengths at Oakland University include:
Oakland University Library's Special Collections hold numerous local history resources documenting people, places, and events of Oakland County and Southeast Michigan, including:
Special Collections at Oakland University are rich in materials dating from the Civil War and documenting Lincoln's presidency and assassination, most notably:
Oakland University has acquired and preserved a number of political collections documenting important local, state, and national events of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Highlights include:
The Marguerite Hicks Collection is one of the first intentional collections of works by and about women from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be gathered by an American collector.
In 1971 Oakland University’s Kresge Library purchased the collection 900+ items of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century books, printed materials, and manuscripts by and about British women writers from Marguerite Bieber Hicks, who started building her collection in the 1930s.
The Collection features broadsides, novels, cookbooks, political tracts, educational texts, sermons, plays, poetry, and more. Dozens of the items in this collection exist in fewer than ten known copies worldwide, and a handful are uniquely existing copies.
The Robert Gaylor LGBTQ+ Collection includes more than 3,200 books and other materials focusing on LGBTQ+ people and social issues. Fiction and non-fiction works are present, covering a wide range of disciplines such as religion, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, politics, literature, and the arts. Approximately 40 percent of the collection features gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer fictional characters. Several important journals, magazines, newspapers and other periodicals are also included.
Our rare book collection of 2,730 books is particularly strong in Michigan local history, 19th and 20th century British and American literature, and private presses.
The Jane M. Bingham Historical Children's Literature Collection
Professor Jane M. Bingham, an emerita education professor at Oakland University and an expert on children's literature, amassed this collection of historic children's books, periodicals, and artifacts. The books are arranged in chronological order so that researchers can see how children's books developed over the decades. The collection also includes a section of reference books related to children's literature.
The personal library of Jonathan Riley-Smith, a prominent historian of the Crusades, contains hundreds of books, but also slides of historic sites in the Middle East, personal papers, recordings, and photographs.