University Archives & Special Collections: Introduction

Welcome to the Susquehanna University Archives!

The Archives is home to the official records of Susquehanna University and its predecessor institutions, the Missionary Institute and Susquehanna Female College. It also includes papers and memorabilia from students, alumni, and faculty, as well as materials related to local history.

Unlike library books, which have an individual catalog record for each book, archival records are grouped in collections based on the person or office who created them, and described in finding aids, which look a bit like detailed tables of contents. The collections are organized by record groups, which are large general categories organized by the types of places which produced the records, such as the Office of the President, which contains individual collections from most of the former presidents of Susquehanna and the Missionary Institute. The record groups will give you an idea of what areas the archives have collections in, and how they are organized overall.

The Archives is now using ArchivesSpace, an online archival-collections platform, to create and publish the finding aids which describe our individual collections. We have lots more than we currently have entered in ArchivesSpace, but you can now use it to browse some of our collections online! While we work on entering more material into ArchivesSpace, we will also maintain some of our older finding aids for popular collections under the Collections tab.

There's lots more in the Archives than is described in these pages - if you're interested in a particular topic or have a question about university history, or whether we have information on a particular topic, please contact the archivist.

The Archives is located on the lower level of Blough-Weis Library and is open by appointment. During the academic year, you can schedule a meeting with the archivist through the Blough-Weis Library Appointments page by choosing the option for Archives & Special Collections. You can also contact the archivist directly at any time of the year.