L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library
[1] Since its inception, the special collections have been housed in numerous places including the crawl space of a university building and a wholesale grocery warehouse.
The purpose of the expedition was to look for evidences to support The Book of Mormon; collectors gathered field notes, photos, botany samples, and correspondences.
[4]: 122 By 1925, what would eventually become the university's special collections stacks were relocated to a small manuscript room in the Grant Library.
[4]: 101 In the 1930s, BYU professor Wilford Poulson began to collect copies of various Mormon diaries,[4] and staff librarian Newburn I.
[5] S. Lyman Tyler was appointed library director in 1954 and from the beginning of his term he was particularly interested in establishing a university archival program.
[6]: 126 Tyler was a member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA),[7] and looked to the organization for guidance on how to establish a university archive.
[8] On 26 March 1956, BYU president Ernest L. Wilkinson sent out a university directive that stated, "The director of libraries is also designated historian and archivist for the Unified Church School System.
"[9] Effectively, this directive authorized the library director as an archivist as well, putting Tyler in an administrative position to create an archival system at BYU.
[6] The next year the archives were forced off-campus due to space limitations; Special Collections was housed in the storage area of the Utah Wholesale Grocery Warehouse where it stayed from 1959 to 1960.
[6] By 1965, Special Collections contained a hand-written Bible from the 13th century and a first-edition copy of The Federalist by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton.
An exhibit of the collection included a first edition Book of Mormon, a copy of the first LDS hymnal, and a first-edition Pearl of Great Price.
Department chairs include Scott Duvall (1999–2002), P. Bradford Westwood (2002–2009), Russ Taylor (2009–2014), J. Gordon Daines III (2014–2020), Tom Wells (2020-2021), and Dainan Skeem (2021-present).
The 19th Century Collections contain documents and artifacts related to mining, Indian history, religion, and westward migration.
[20] The 20th Century Collection contains documents from Reed Smoot, David M. Kennedy, and many mission diaries that reflect the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This archive contains television episodes from director Henry S. Kesler, and papers of actor James Stewart, Harry Carey, and Robert Cummings.
[24] The archive now contains the complete collection from Republic Pictures[25] as well as compositions of Max Steiner, including scores for King Kong and Gone with the Wind which were acquired in 1981.
Items acquired in this collection include correspondences of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Lord Byron.
There are other partial and completed manuscripts from authors Louisa May Alcott, Leslie Norris, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The music recordings found here include cylinders, 78 rpm discs, cassette tapes, DVDs, and other audio formats.
[28] The Photograph Archives at L. Tom Perry Special Collections works to digitize information so that it can be made available to the public online.
This collection includes field notes from BYU folklore students and focuses on families and the religious lives of Latter-day Saints.
It is the largest collection of Mormon folklore and contains legends, songs, jokes, riddles, and personal narratives.
The Western and Mormon Americana collections were later expanded to include parts of the personal libraries of LeRoy Hafen, Wilford Paulson, and Dale Morgan.
