Campus building holds some of Kentucky’s richest stories

Special Collections

Special Collections

Abigail Eaton

[email protected]

Situated on Maxwell Place, a nondescript brick building holds secrets of Kentucky and the world’s history.

Housed in the Margaret I. King Library, Special Collections is home to a variety of resources and artifacts dating back hundreds of years.

The oldest artifact is a cuneiform tablet detailing a recipt for beer, but the library also a leaf from the Gutenberg bible, and some of the earliest photographhs taken in Kentucky.

“What we are here primarily to do is to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Kentucky,” Associate Dean Deirdre Scaggs said.

The university archives document the history of UK, dating all the way back to its founding in 1865. There are also audiovisual archives which document central and eastern Kentucky. The largest collection is the Lexington Herald-Leader photo archives, which contain about a million photographs.

The Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center is also included in Special Collections. It is a bipartisan collection that documents Kentucky politicians and organizations that promote public policy. There is also the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, which focuses on the collection and preservation of oral histories.

Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center, helped create a system known at OHMS, which allows people to search for keywords in an oral history so that information can be easily accessed. The system has spread from UK to more than 200 other organizations.

“No better resource (exists), I think, to understand history or the humanities than oral history,” Boyd said.  

The library holds thousands of interviews, and most can be found online through the Special Collections website.

“We’ve got an interview with Martin Luther King Jr, with Jackie Kennedy, but we’ve also got hundreds of interviews with tobacco farmers … coals miners, it’s not just the famous,” Boyd said.

As a student, there are several different ways to utilize the Special Collections Research Center. A Education Archivist works with faculty to promote using the library for classes.

The program had been growing each year, and faculty encourage students to research for papers with the Special Collections online archive.

Even with such a large variety of information, Special Collections continues to obtain more historical materials. They rely entirely on community donations to build the collections.

“We rely a lot on word of mouth and people letting others know and us trying to promote what we have through our events and lectures,” Scaggs said.

A recent oral history outreach lead to a donation of poems. Currently, Special Collections is preparing for the 2020 Anniversary of the Suffrage Movement.

Students who are interested in visiting special collections can stop by any time, but if they have a specific material in mind, they can call ahead to make sure the artifact is at UK. Some are stored offsite in a temperature controlled limestone quarry.

Addtional reporting by Lexington Souers