Spotlight
Libraries: History Preserved
| USF News
Tucked away on the fourth floor of the USF Tampa Library sits a rich repository of historical treasures — a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet, the oral testimonies of the Allied service men and women who helped liberate World War II concentration camps, photographic prints of Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer photographer and the father of the moving image.
USF Libraries' Special & Digital Collections houses rare, fragile and unique source materials ranging from early printed books, photographs and illustrations to sheet music, ephemera and maps arranged around seven major collecting areas.
While there is much to see and touch, it's what you can learn that makes Special Collections such an important destination according to Mark I. Greenberg, director of Special & Digital Collections.
"We exist to support an honors thesis, a dissertation, to help a faculty member or researcher write a book," he says. "Scholars from around the world use our collections."
Collecting Areas
- Florida and Caribbean Basin
A collection relating to Florida's history and culture, especially the Tampa Bay region and its relationship with the Caribbean. Ybor City, West Tampa's immigrant experience and the Spanish Civil War make up some of the collection's major focus areas. - Children's and Young Adult Literature
A collection including more than 25,000 volumes that support the study of historical and contemporary American young adult and children's literature. - Science Fiction
A collection including pulp magazines, several thousand iconic works and a growing collection of Spanish language science fiction. - The Arts
A collection encompassing theater, photography and prints, cartoon art and sheet music, including the Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection, one of the largest Boucicault collections in the world. - Literature and Book Arts
A collection featuring the history of the book with examples of early printing in western Europe and America, a 10,000-plus volume Dobkin collection of 19th Century Americana, and a range of British and American history and literature. - Digital Collections
A growing collection that provides online access to many Special collections materials.
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The Jose Gaspar enters downtown Tampa during the Gasparilla Pirate Invasion, 1938.
Burgert Brothers Photograph Collection (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections). -
"Paeonia corallina" from British Phaenogamous Botany by William Baxter, 1834-43.
Rare Book Collection (part of the Literature and Book Arts collections). -
LeRoy Petersohn, 11th Armored Division, US Army. Eye witness narrative of the Mauthausen and Gusen liberations.
Concentration Camp Liberators Oral History Project (part of the Holocaust & Genocide Studies collections). -
Dion Boucicault, 19th century playwright, actor, and producer, as Conn in his play "The Shaughraun," 1874.
Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection (part of the Arts collections). -
"Tampa Life" cigar box label, 1927, Preston Cigar Co., Gomez Ave., Tampa.
Tampa Cigar Industry & Art Collection (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections). -
"La Florida" by Geronimo Chaves, c1600. Originally appeared in: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
Florida Map Collection (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections). -
The marriage record of Henry H. Dickey and Kate Kennedy, February 27, 1887.
Hillsborough County Marriage Records Collection (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections). -
Theodore de Bry engravings of Jacques Le Moyne drawings. Plate XXVI, Hunting Alligators, from Brevis narratio eorvm qvæ in Florida … acciderunt, 1591.
Rare book (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections) -
View of encampment for soldiers in Tampa who were waiting to sail to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, 1898.
Wehman Collection of Spanish American War Photographs (part of the Florida and Caribbean Basin collections). -
Illustrated envelope and letter home from WWII serviceman Al Yorkunas to his wife, Mary Anne, 1944.
Yorkunas Collection (part of the Graphic Arts collections).