Special Collections Fourth Floor West 882-0076 Collections of primary resources and valuable research materials have been grouped together in the Special Collections Department. Included are the rare book collection, the microform collection, and a variety of other collections including philosophical works, English tracts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, comic art, and journalists in fiction. The MU Libraries have one of the largest collections of microforms in North America. All microforms in Ellis Library except United States government documents, United Nations documents, ERIC documents, college catalogs, and telephone directories are centralized in the Special Collections Department. More than 1,000 newspaper titles are in the collection including nineteen major dailies, early American newspapers, underground newspapers, and many other national, international, and special interest newspapers.
Indexes are available for twenty-three newspapers.
The periodicals collection includes both current subscriptions and backfiles, and it is especially strong in the fields of education, theater, music, and Latin America. Two large collections of early periodicals, American Periodicals Series and English Literary Periodicals, are also available. The microform collection has many holdings of interest to historians and political scientists. American documents include early state records, National Archives collections, Papers of U. S. Presidents, CIA research reports, confidential Department of State files, proceedings of political party conventions, and church histories. International historical materials include French Revolutionary War pamphlets, British Public Record Office papers, British House of Commons Papers, and India Office Library records.