 Welcome to John Jay Burns Library. Burns Library is the rare books, special collections and archives branch of Boston College Libraries and supports the local and international research community with its unique collections content. So what are special collections and archives anyway? It's library jargon, but it just means groups of materials that are one of a kind and or rare and or valuable. But everything in the library is all three of these categories. Formats here at Burns Library can include, but definitely aren't limited to, books, manuscripts and archives, often as personal papers and the records of organizations, photographs, audio recordings and videos, maps, artifacts, ephemera and born digital material. Special collections are a place of active research and active research potential. We provide you with access to original format, primary source materials to study and analyze and draft theories around. Students come to special collections to find primary sources so that they can develop their own interpretations about events and attitudes of people in the past for a history of sociology paper. Look at an author's literary drafts and research materials to analyze how it was written for an English project. Interpret artifacts of popular culture from different eras to draw conclusions about the wider culture in American studies. Trace the development of scientific discoveries over time to better understand our current scientific knowledge and much, much more. To serve BC students, faculty and other scholars, Boston College has decided to focus on these topics to make its collections unique. Jesuit and American Catholic history. The history of Boston. Irish and Irish American history, literature and music. The history and culture of the Caribbean. British Catholic authors from the mid 19th to the mid 20th centuries. Nursing history, theory and practice. Popular fiction such as mystery, detective fiction and comic books. And the history of Boston College held in the university archives. So who uses all this Burns Library special collection stuff anyway? Everybody. Although Boston College invested in these materials for the BC community to use, Burns Library is open to anyone who is willing to register and follow our guidelines for use. With well over 700 archival collections and 200,000 books in our collections, you can find sources for your projects, even if it doesn't fit in one of our collecting areas. As a BC student, you can drop in any time we are open or make an appointment for a time that works for you. Special collections are not just for graduate students or for faculty. We've helped researchers from eight to more than 80 years old. So not only can we assist you with your undergraduate research needs, we'd love to see more of you. You can use these materials for any reason you want. Class assignments, personal interests, or to show off something to your visiting friends and family. We don't expect you to be library special collections experts. Just like the librarians in every BC library, we're here to help you. You're not bothering us. Come ask us any questions you'd like about how to use our collections. How did we get these collections? Although not formally gathered together as Burns Library until the 1980s, our collections have been acquired throughout the entire history of Boston College and continue to grow. Why are the collections growing, despite the fact that our building isn't? Because we want to gather any materials relevant to our collecting focus, either unique or rare, or scholarship being currently published. History and scholarship don't stop, and we want our collections to be the best resource available for future researchers. How do we collect more materials? We receive donations of materials and transfers from other college departments, offices, and libraries. We also evaluate what's currently for sale and relevant to our collecting areas. So we're ready to act when we receive donations of money or need to spend our line item budget to purchase stuff from dealers or individuals. So how valuable are the collections? Public services isn't involved in acquiring materials, so we don't know, and we don't want to know. We focus on the intellectual and research value, not the monetary value. Besides, if we knew how much something cost, we'd all interact with it differently. You'd be hesitant to touch things, which is something we don't want. Special collections materials cannot easily be replaced, so we want to balance immediate research needs with keeping materials safe for generations of future research. You'll notice some differences in special collections from other research libraries, like limiting what you can bring into the reading room to an ID, pencil, loose notebook paper, phone or camera, and various cords. No checking out materials. It's either used in the reading room or in the classroom under staff supervision. We have visible video cameras and security guards as well as temperature and humidity controls. We can ask about our oldest material all the time, so much so that we made a library FAQ about it. Go to answers.bc.edu and type in oldest to find out more. What else we think is interesting about our collections? We tell you almost daily via our social media postings and weekly in our blog posts. We've done a lot of information at you in the last few minutes, but if you remember nothing else, know that you can ask for help and know that you can come back and use Burns Library for any reason you want. Use the link below to contact us and we will get in touch with you shortly. You'll also have a chance to submit questions before class, ask questions in class, or ask for consultations with special collection staff. Thanks for watching and see you soon.