Teaching with Rare Books

Since its inception one hundred years ago, the mission of the Chapin Library has been to support teaching and research at Williams College with rare books, manuscripts, and other special materials. As an early donor, Carroll Atwood Wilson (Class of 1907), wrote, every item in the Chapin Library “has been placed there for an educational purpose. The sum of those items is there to represent, in an organized way, every field of thought. . . . Frankly, the writer believes that there is no field of thought which cannot be . . . represented by the material in Chapin: the curator of the library surprised the astronomers in 1937 as much as she did the students of Vergil in 1930, and the lovers of early American geography in 1945.”

As the body of students and faculty at Williams has grown and its curriculum has become more varied, so the Chapin collections have developed, largely by gift or through funds provided by gift, to accommodate new subjects as well as fields of thought long established. Use of the collections has grown too, as faculty have discovered the value of teaching with primary sources, and that their students respond with enthusiasm when handling rare items in their original form. The provision, moreover, of splendid rooms in new Sawyer for the Chapin Library and College Archives, with space for reading and teaching, has raised the visibility of special collections and made them still more attractive to the Williams community.

Our new exhibition, Every Field of Thought: Teaching with Rare Books, celebrates the continuing use of the Chapin Library collections in the service of education, in partnership with faculty and with library and museum colleagues, through dozens of classes and presentations each term, in addition to supporting individual research projects, papers, and theses. At the same time, we honor the generosity of our many donors, from Alfred Clark Chapin (Class of 1869) at the founding of the Chapin Library to the present day, who have given Williams this important and dynamic means of instruction.

The exhibition is on view in the Chapin Gallery (Sawyer Library 406) through December 23, 2015.

Wayne Hammond, Chapin Librarian
Elaine Yanow, Chapin Library Assistant

The words of Carroll Atwood Wilson are quoted from the foreword to his Catalogue of the Collection of Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) in the Chapin Library, Williams College (1945).

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