VCU Libraries: Inside The Collection

Harris Stilson’s films offer rare scenes of Richmond a century ago A century ago, Richmonder motorman Harris H. Stilson ran one of the city’s now-defunct streetcars along the Old Clay Street line for 25 cents an hour. An amateur photographer, he brought his camera along to work and shot footage across the Richmond area. Traversing […]

Collaboration is a common practice in collection development in Special Collections and Archives, which houses records for many of Richmond’s seminal organizations. This year marks the centennial of the founding of the Junior League of Richmond, which has entrusted thousands of documents, images, scrapbooks, memorabilia and other materials to VCU Libraries’ care. More than 10 […]

VCU Libraries has digitized the archive of Virginia Dental Association Journals in partnership with the Virginia Dental Association (VDA).  The VDA began publishing the Bulletin of the Virginia State Dental Association in August 1921. In June of 1964, the VDA changed the title of the serial to the Virginia Dental Journal.  Over the years, the […]

The April 2, 2022 program on Artistic Mansions of West Franklin Street is a continuation of a career of teaching and leadership in architectural history by Charles E. Brownell, Ph.D. Brownell, teaching in the Art History Department, headed VCU’s Architectural History Program and for 20 years organized a symposium of architecture and decorative arts. After […]

The Social Welfare History Project continues to serve the public as both an educational resource and a portal for reference questions related to the site’s materials.  More than 1.5 million visits to the project were recorded, most of which occurred during the school year. Undergraduates, public school students and researchers accessed hundreds of different articles. The […]

Thanks to the work and dedication of talented summer intern Jon Faulconer, two manuscript collections documenting stories of the LGBTQ community in Richmond are now open and available for research. This work strategically aligns resources in support of VCU’s new LGBTQ Studies hiring initiative. The Betsy Brinson collection of AIDS epidemic exhibit materials includes seven oral […]

Finding Aid In 1946, following the chaos and horror of World War II and concerned by what they saw as the American education system’s failure, Algernon D. Black, a leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and Alice Kohn Pollitzer, a prominent civic leader, began an experiment in democratic living. Inspired in part […]

One of the emerging and expanding roles of libraries is the creation of scholarship. This work, which adds to the ongoing role of libraries to provide protection, perservation and access to scholarship, is explored in a transcribathon in partnership with the respected Folger Shakespeare Library.In 2015 and 2017, VCU Libraries bought some 100 members of the […]

Find It A new resource at VCU Libraries provides an almost “street view” of the topsy-turvy world of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes — only it was all too real for those who lived on the margins:  London Low Life. Through visual records of cartoons, maps, sketches, subversive posters — and the texts of broadsides, “swell’s […]

This fall,  James Branch Cabell Library will showcase a set of posters  from the students of the Masters of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) Program in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Policy. The posters will be displayed on the long wall on the east side of Cabell Library (the wall adjacent to […]