The Department of Special Collections is open to all members of the University community: undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff; as well as to outside researchers.

Washington University Archives supports scholarship in many academic fields by preserving and providing access to over 300 unique collections that chronicle the history of Washington University from 1853 to today.

The collections contain a wealth of primary sources and other historical materials that include manuscripts, photographic prints and negatives, books, film, sound recordings, microfilm, architectural plans, and artifacts. 

Most collections chronicle the history of Washington University from 1853 to the present day.  These collections include papers and artifacts relating to student, faculty, and administrative life, such as:

• student produced publications such as the student newspaper Student Life  (1878-present) and The Hatchet yearbook (1903-2011)

• professional & personal papers of faculty members such as Arthur Holly Compton

• early documents from the University's founding, including the papers of  Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot

Also archived are Local History collections, which focus on late 19th and 20th century topics of St. Louis and the surrounding area (city, near-by counties, and metro-east Illinois)

Collections with the area of local history are mainly focused on themes of:

• business archives

• transportation & urban planning

• political records

• social welfare & social justice

• architecture

University Archives and Local History Archives are part of the Washington University Library System, Department of Special Collections.

An archives is a place where people go to find information. But rather than gathering information from books as you would in a library, people who do research in archives often gather firsthand facts, data, and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, audio and video recordings, and other primary sources.

Archives – and the professional archivists who work in them – make sure that all important records will be available for research by generations to come. To help preserve material, archivists in all types of repositories store archived records in conditions that will provide the greatest protection, whiile still allowing use of the items by researchers.

-- adapted from an article written by Lee Ann Potter for Cobblestone Magazine, September 2003.  For full text, see http://files.archivists.org/advocacy/AAM/WhatIsAnArchives.pdf