Quick Search: Articles, newspapers, books and ebooks, videos and more. Results primarily available online but may also include books available in the library or articles that can be requested for email delivery from ILLiad.
Library Information: Pages on library web site, for example research guides, library policies and procedures, hours and events.
Von Tobel Family Papers, 19051997. MS-00589. Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. (Box 09 folder 02)
Many of the Christmas presents children receive today would have looked very strange under the Christmas tree of Von Tobel family in the 1920s. A small metal rectangle with wires that connect to the ears, an animal made of metal, a box filled with plastics bricks that you assemble yourself—MP3 players, robotic pets, and LEGOs are just some of the gifts that today's children desire during the holiday season that children of the 1920s would never have dreamed of.…Read More
The Center for Gaming Research in Special Collections has announced its 2014-15 class of Eadington Fellows. A description of each Fellow, with a summary of their intended research and the date and title of their talk, follows. They will be in residence in Special Collections beginning in January and continuing through June. Their talks are free and open to the public.
Catherine Borg
Borg (MFA Rutgers 2004, BA SFSU 1995) is a visual artist and educator in Baltimore, MD where she teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and Stevenson University. Her photo and video based art works have been included in exhibitions and screenings throughout the US, Europe and Canada, including at SF MOMA and Mass MOCA, and realized as public art projects for the Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission, the City of Las Vegas and Scottsdale Public Art. Awards include residency fellowships from the…Read More
Special Collections Director, Michelle Light is a Las Vegas native, and was recently named a fellow of the Society of American Archivists and a Distinguished Alumni of the University of Michigan's School of Information.
Special Collections faculty members Peter Michel, Head of Exhibits, and Cory Lampert, Head of Digital Collections, were part of the successful grant writing team effort that received some $311, 000 in NEH funding for the digitization of over 100,000 pages of historic Nevada newspapers as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
This summer, the UNLV University Libraries provided multiple fellowship opportunities for UNLV graduate students. Faculty librarians in three departments hired and directed graduate students to work on a variety of key projects.
Partially funded by the Library Advisory Board, graduate students worked as information literacy fellows and in Special Collections.
The Special Collections graduate students worked as researchers, archivists, and historians as they processed hundreds of unique items. Special Collections faculty and staff taught the students national professional descriptive standards and trained them to use the ArchivesSpace collection management system.
In August Special Collections launched the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. With assistance from a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UNLV Libraries will collect historical primary sources (e.g., photographs, documents, newspapers, and more) about the Southern Nevada Jewish community, conduct oral histories to capture first hand testimony about Jewish life in Las Vegas, and create a digital collection to provide online access to these historical resources.
So far, we've been contacting individuals and groups in the community to get them involved in the project and start thinking about how we can find and collect evidence about Jewish life and the contributions of Jewish individuals in Southern Nevada. We've also started digitizing many photographs and manuscripts from our…Read More
Halloween Ball Invitation, October 1919. UNLV Special Collections, Wengert Family Papers (MS-00192); box 1, folder 5
Boo! Sometimes Las Vegas can be downright scary. At UNLV Special Collections, archival materials document the city’s rich history of celebrating Halloween. During my 2014 summer internship here, I was delighted to stumble upon several ghoulish finds from Sin City’s Halloweens past.
Take for instance an invitation for a Halloween ball in 1919. Found as I processed the Wengert Family Papers (MS-00192), this invite was sent to a young Las Vegas pioneer shortly after her arrival in Las Vegas. The October 31 ball featured dancing, apple-bobbing, and a costume contest at a local lodge. The artwork of the invitation itself remains in…Read More
Special Collections is excited to announce that our colleague, David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research, recently received two awards in the Nevada Press Association’s 2014 Better Newspaper contest, thanks to his work in Vegas Seven magazine.
Schwartz was recognized in the categories of Best Local Column for his bi-weekly Green Felt Journal and Best Feature Story for “The Book That Tried to End Vegas,” a look back on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris’s The Green felt Jungle. On the whole, Vegas Seven received 18 NPA awards this year, including a first-place…Read More
The Thunderbird Hotel Records (MS-00180) are comprised of material that documents the work of this Las Vegas, Nevada hotel's entertainment department from 1964 to 1973. The records consist of photographs, memos, newspaper clippings, and publicity materials. The hotel hosted many entertainment acts that included showgirls, whose costumes exposed various amounts of skin. As I went through the nine boxes of records, I found many interesting images related to showgirls.
The Thunderbird Hotel records include material from the 1960s and…Read More
Over the summer I’ve been lucky enough to work on the Robert Beckmann Photographs (PH-00381), which consist of photographs and slides of artist Robert Beckmann’s paintings, murals, and art installations. Mr. Beckmann, who has won numerous awards for his art, including the Governor’s Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts from the state of Nevada as well as fellowships from the Western States Arts Foundation and the Nevada State Council on the Arts, donated thousands of slides and photographs of his work to Special Collections this month. I was assigned to organize, inventory, and write the finding aid for his donation. During my work, I discovered both the complexity and diversity of projects Mr. Beckmann has accomplished over a career that has spanned more than four decades. For example, I saw images of the…Read More
