Through our Special Collections, Bryn Mawr offers a unique opportunity for students to use great literature in the form in which it first appeared, antique cookbooks, the working papers of important scholars, letters between the earliest administrators of the College, ancient pottery, original Japanese prints, and hundreds of other objects in their classes and research. Every year the curators work with dozens of classes and hundreds of students on projects that range from single classroom visits to semester-long collaborations.
In Fall 2007, fourteen undergraduate students joined a class that gave them a unique opportunity to work with medieval manuscripts for the entire semester, drawing on Bryn Mawr’s substantial collection of these beautiful hand -made volumes. As part of the class, students planned and created an exhibition with the books that ran in the Rare Book Room the following Spring. Marianne Hansen, Curator and Academic Liaison for Rare Books and Manuscripts, worked with the class throughout the semester and through the duration of the show. She spoke on her experience at a professional meeting (Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association), and her paper has just been published in a new book on the use of special collections and archives in undergraduate education.

You can read the article without borrowing the book by looking it up in the open access repository of the scholarship and publications of the Bryn Mawr community (on Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College), at http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_pubs/11/. Click the download button to read:

Marianne Hansen. “Real Objects, Real Spaces, Real Expertise: An Undergraduate Seminar Curates an Exhibition on the Medieval Book of Hours,” in Past or Portal?: Enhancing Undergraduate Learning Through Special Collections and Archives. Eleanor Mitchell; Peggy Seiden; Suzy Taraba, editors. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. 2012.