Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
Arizona and the Southwest at the University of Arizona Library Special Collections
Josiah Gregg's Commerce Of The Prairies, 1844. Courtesy of the University of Arizona Library Special Collections.
JC: Tell me about your collection books and manuscripts on Arizona, Borderlands and Southwest materials.
SS: The history of the Southwest and the borderlands is our primary collecting area and so we try to be as comprehensive as possible both in terms of printed works and manuscripts collections. So, it is really our major driving force in our collecting.
Our book collection runs the gamut from early rare books on the region to contemporary books. That’s one of the things about our collection that people don’t realize: that even though we are an archival repository, we don’t just focus on old and rare books on the Southwest, we try to be as comprehensive as possible, so therefore really anything that relates to the Southwest that’s been published we try to have a copy of. As far as published works go, we go as far back as the late 1500s when the first works about the region were being published. As I showed you in our collection, we have really all of the major works and nearly everything that has been done in that era. When it comes to our manuscripts collections, we follow the same approach, try to be as comprehensive as possible, and also try to cover as much ground as far as different eras and time periods. So we have manuscript collections that go as far back as for example the Kino diary in 1699. But we are also continuously bringing in collections of contemporary people who are notable in the Southwest, or Southwest writers like [Edward] Abbey, Lawrence Clark Powell. This is nice collection because not only does it contain information about him, it has all his research files from his writings, which include a lot of historical information about the Southwest.
We not only collect things that you would think of as historical in nature, but also things like Congressional records, people like Stewart and Mo Udall and Dennis DeConcini. And so again, we try to be as comprehensive as possible on the manuscript side of things including photographs as well. We have a massive photograph collection on the Southwest. We collect the Southwest, but we are especially keen on Arizona materials as well. And so of course the Southwest includes Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Northwest Mexico and surrounding regions. There’s a fair amount of discussion as far as where the Southwest begins and ends. I think it’s pretty well accepted that Arizona and New Mexico are really the heart of the region and where it ends going out from there is open to debate. That area of Southwestern Arizona history and literature we try to be as comprehensive as possible. It’s really our main focus as far as collecting.
JC: So, would you say that Arizona and the Southwest is the primary focus within Special Collections?
SS: Definitely.
JC: What is your collection development policy? Are you actively acquiring materials at this point? How does that work? Is this a growing collection?
