When Special Collections Librarian Autumn M. Johnson of the Georgia Southern University Libraries spoke to the Bulloch County Historical Society this week, she brought information about those priceless holdings back to one of their sources.
That is, the Bulloch County Historical Society and its members have contributed documents related to the history of Bulloch County, the surrounding area and Georgia Southern itself to the university’s collections for more than 40 years. Johnson is based at the Zach Henderson Library on the Statesboro campus, where she heads a staff of three, but the Special Collections also extend to the Lane Library on the Armstrong campus in Savannah.
Georgia Southern University Museum Director Brent Tharp, as vice president of the Historical Society, introduced Johnson for her presentation at the society’s Jan. 27 lunchtime monthly meeting. So, one of the tasks she set for herself with her remarks was to differentiate the role the library’s special collections from that of the museum, while also acknowledging that they collaborate frequently.
Special Collections, while a unit of GS University Libraries, is a type of archive and also has some aspects in common with a museum, she noted.
“I always like to describe, especially to my students, that Special Collections is sort of the library within the library,” said Johnson, who is also an associate professor. “It’s where we showcase the most rare, unique holdings in the library, and like the library, we want it accessible, we want it in the hands of researchers.”
Special Collections usually doesn’t hold artifacts – such as a Native American canoe or a fossil Mosasaur – that you might find in the museum, unless those artifacts happen to be books or documents. Its emphasis is on printed and handwritten items of historical significance, maps and illustrations, photographs and now also, textual and visual items in digital form.
“But like the museum, we have a lot of protected treasures, and there’s a lot of rules in place,” Johnson said. “It’s not unnecessarily so, but we want to make sure we’re safeguarding our materials.”
In other words, visitors can’t come in and freely browse the shelves as they might in most areas of a public library or other parts of the university library. Most of the Special Collections materials aren’t even kept that way, and have to be requested from the staff.
Many are stored out of sight in the library’s ARC, or automatic retrieval collection, which saves space and is shielded by literal firewalls and a fire suppression system.
Digital access
In-person visits to Special Collections are possible, but Johnson recommends starting with its online resources. All of the materials are indexed in the digital library catalog and some are accessible via the Georgia Southern Commons website, digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu.
Another gateway is Special Collections’ own site, georgiasouthern.libguides.com/specialcollections.
“As you would expect … we exist to serve our parent institution, Georgia Southern, first, but we also serve a number of other communities,” Johnson said.
The library unit is called Special Collections, plural, because it contains about 500 separately identified “special collections,” of documents such as manuscripts. These “can range from a single envelope to a 300-box collection,” Johnson said.
About 99%, she said, have been donated by families, individuals or organizations, and the staff continues to seek historically significant donations of this type.
Special Collections also holds about 5,000 bound volumes and books, or since the addition of the Armstrong campus collections, about 6,000, said Johnson.
“These can be related to Bulloch County history, but also just the general history of Georgia Southern, the history of the Southeast Georgia region,” she said. “And within our own collection we house parts of the Bulloch County Historical Society collection.”
Big BCHS collection
The Historical Society and its members have been contributing to the library’s Special Collections holdings since at least the 1980s.
“So that is one of those huge 50-, 60-box collections that we have,” Johnson told the group’s members. “So we do have the records of the organization that you guys are a part of nestled within Special Collections.”
The Bulloch County Historical Society’s collection is also one of the most carefully catalogued, with an approximately 300-page “finding aid” describing “every single photograph, every single sheet of paper,” she said.
575-year-old book
But the oldest thing in Special Collections – and the oldest actual item at the Henderson Library – dates from long before the 1796 founding of Bulloch County. It’s a “Book of Hours,” a prayer book for each hour of the day in manuscript form, in other words handwritten and decorated, on vellum in vernacular Dutch, from 1450.
“So our oldest thing is 1450 and our newest thing is 2025 because of course we’re always collecting the history of our region, so any kind of newspaper or magazine that gets produced, even in January 2025,” Johnson said.
Most of the researchers she sees are from Georgia Southern, including faculty researchers, students and staff. But many professional researchers and faculty from other universities use the collections, which also have a following among genealogists.
She said she refers some to the local public library “but we complement each other with our collections.”
Successful research
Examples she shared of research that drew from Georgia Southern Special Collections resources in the last two years included a GSU student researcher’s project on the Women’s Army Corps of World War II, another’s investigation of municipal government hiring during the Jim Crow era, and another student’s historical research on “Operation Big Buzz,” an experiment on the use of insects in warfare.
A non-GSU student researcher completed a report on rural electrification’s effects on economic development in the Southeast. A non-GSU faculty researcher researched the history of Central State Hospital, the former psychiatric hospital at Milledgeville. A government researcher explored “nautical excursions of U.S. presidents.”
One of Johnson’s students processed the papers of the late state Sen. Jack Hill, “a huge undertaking,” and state House Speaker Jon Burns visited and was reportedly impressed.
Most recently, the library Special Collections unit has worked with history Professor Brian K. Feltman, Ph.D., and his students as they documented all of the soldiers from Bulloch County known to have died in World War I in a digital exhibit. For this “Bulloch World War I Memorial Project,” see georgiasouthern.libguides.com/bullochmemorial.
A special public appeal was made to add the stories of previously underrepresented African American soldiers. The library team is now working with Feltman and students on a physical exhibit to be installed in March focusing on participation in the war by African American residents of Bulloch County.
“That exhibit is courtesy of the Georgia Humanities Council, so a lot of the folks in the state are seeing some of the value of what we’re doing,” Johnson said.
Community outreach
Under the heading of programming and outreach, she noted that the library unit has a continuing research relationship with the Willow Hill Heritage & Renaissance Center, which has its own collection of documents and recorded oral histories. GSU Libraries Special Collections is also working with the public Statesboro-Bulloch County Library to host a genealogy fair at the university campus this year.
In outreach projects of its own, Special Collections has in the past few years hosted “escape room” game-based learning activities on various regional history topics, usually in October, which is Georgia Archives Month.
“Bland’s Botanical Bequest: An Escape Room from University Libraries” in October 2022 and related research garnered Johnson awards from the Society of Georgia Archivists and the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council.
Johnson’s team consists of herself, special collections assistant Willow Farmer and temporary-projects archivist Erin Patterson.