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Reading Room Hours
The Archives & Special Collections Reading Room is open Monday through Friday 11-1 by appointment. If you wish to view any items from the archives or our non-circulating book collections, please complete the following form.
Welcome!
The mission of the Bard College Archives & Special Collections is to collect, preserve and make available materials in a variety of formats relating to the intellectual and social history of Bard College and its surrounding communities. By offering online and physical access to its holdings, the Archives & Special Collections seeks to support the research and work of undergraduates, the greater Bard community, public historians, private researchers, and scholars worldwide.
The Bard College Archives & Special Collections documents the history of the College and the Hudson Valley through its collections, and preserves significant book collections to ensure their long term availability. This website serves to showcase some of the materials available for study, as well as to provide enhanced access to selected materials. Our collections fall into the following categories: College archives; Local and Regional History archives; Delafield Family/Montgomery Place archives; and Monographic Special Collections. Click around and be curious! Specific collections will be presented or described in the following pages.
New Digital Collection: Poetry at Bard
These audio recordings have been digitized from a collection of cassette and open reel tapes of readings and lectures at Bard over the last 50 years. The collection was initially established with funds provided by the Carter A Towbin Poetry Fund in 1982 and first located in Albee Hall before moving to the Olin Building. Our hope is to use the recordings to help tell the story of Bard as an exuberant place for poetry for more than half a century. We will continue to add to this collection as we are able to migrate our reel to reel tapes to digital format. Currently, all of the cassette tapes are represented in the collection below.
Visiting the Archives
The Archives & Special Collections Reading Room is open Monday through Friday 11-1 by appointment. If you wish to view any items from the archives or our non-circulating book collections, please complete the following form.
Gifts to the Archives
Do you have some St. Stephen’s or Bard memorabilia you would like to donate? The Bard Archives & Special Collections Department accepts donations of archival materials or books that fit into the many of the collections listed above. However, the Department will not accept donations of materials where ownership has not been transferred to the College. Given space and staffing limitations, all gifts for the Bard Archives must be approved by the Archivist, or other appropriate staff. We will be happy to start a discussion with you!
If you are interested in supporting the work that we do in other ways, click here.