Syracuse University was awarded an $18,000 grant in late November to support a pilot program in the Special Collections Research Center.

The grant will support the new Faculty Fellows program, which was established by the SCRC. The goal of the program is to foster new ideas about how to transform the role of special collections at SU, said Lucy Mulroney, senior director of the SCRC.

The Special Collections Research Center is an organization within the SU Libraries system that collects, preserves and provides access to materials that document the history of SU’s global society, including original manuscripts, photographs, architectural renderings, industrial design prototypes, graphic artworks, audio and moving image recordings and more, according to an SU News release.

The grant will allow the SCRC to display a greater variety of primary source documents and rare cultural artifacts held by the SU Libraries than what is currently offered, Mulroney said.

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, a New York City-based nonprofit, awarded the grant to SU to support the design phase of the Faculty Fellows program at the SCRC, said Emma Judkins, administrative assistant of the Delmas Foundation and a longtime investor in projects for the SU Libraries collection.

Faculty fellows will be chosen by an advisory team in the spring of 2016, according to the release.

Mulroney said each faculty fellow will be provided with a $5,000 stipend and a hands-on introduction to the holdings of the SCRC as a part of the program.

The SCRC’s collections hold about 150,000 printed items and more than 30,000 linear feet of archival material in 2,400 separate collections, as well as the holdings of the “renowned” Belfer Audio Archive and the University Archives, Mulroney said.

The SCRC offers unfiltered access to primary source material, the “authentic voice” of a writer or creator from which scholars and students can develop their own views and create their own narratives, according to the release.

Mulroney said the SCRC staff works to integrate the center’s collections into the undergraduate curriculum and the intellectual life of SU. The center’s reading and listening room is located on the sixth floor of Bird Library, and the SCRC also offers two specialized classrooms to support teaching with the collections, she said.

Published on December 9, 2015 at 10:24 pm

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