What's New In Special Collections

Staff Highlight: Special Collections Director, Michelle Light

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.

Digitizing Nevada Newspapers

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.

UNLV Libraries Inspire Summer Graduate Fellows in their Roles as Researchers and Historians

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.

…Read More

Documenting Our Region's Jewish Community

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 Happenings in Las Vegas, by Ian M. Baldwin

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

Staff Highlight: David Schwartz Receives Nevada Press Association Awards

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

Collection Highlight: Thunderbird Hotel Records, by Dallas Reiber

Thinderbird Hotel Records, promotional material

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

Collection Highlight: Robert Beckmann Photographs by Lindsay Oden

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

Collection Highlight: Nat Hart Professional Papers by Hannah Robinson

Growing up in eastern Washington, frighteningly faraway from any “good” delis, I always looked forward to visits from my Grandpop (and his carry-on insulated lunchbox full of delicious salty belly lox). Every time I visited my Grandpop in his row house in Bensalem on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he would trick me into trying what he described as the sweetest and most delicious dessert, halvah, an experience I liken to taking a bite out of a stick of chalk. Since my visits with my Grandpop were few and far between, he successfully pulled this practical joke two to three times before I got wise to him. Conversations I had with my Grandpop and other members of my Mom’s family while eating Jewish food like belly lox and poppy seed bagels, matzah ball soup, kasha with onions, pot…Read More