Browse Exhibitions

This exhibit showcases the artistic, surgical, scientific, and technological solutions executed by preservation specialists and conservation experts who accept the mission to preserve and conserve. Each look inside the Center’s laboratories and workrooms is paired with at-home strategies to inspire visitors to make it their mission to preserve their treasures or those of their families or communities.

The Gilmore Music Library celebrates the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the Yale School of Music with an exhibition that highlights the School’s early years. Among the musicians featured are Gustave Stoeckel (the first Professor of Music at Yale), Horatio Parker (the first Dean of the School), Charles Ives, and Paul Hindemith.

Rescuing Horace Walpole: The Achievement of W.S. Lewis, pays tribute to Lewis’s life and legacy as a scholar-collector, on the fortieth anniversary of his bequest of the Lewis Walpole Library to his alma mater, Yale University. Drawing heavily on the recently cataloged Lewis archives, the exhibition shows how the total dedication of the collector resulted in a collection of extraordinary range and depth, and expressed itself in some surprising ways. It also evolved into a monumental achievement of scholarship in the Yale-Walpole edition and, in the process, transformed perceptions of Walpole and his age.

Exhibition focusing on the musical contributions of Bessie Jones, Big Mama Thornton, and Ethel Waters. It highlights key moments in their lives and careers. The exhibit has been created after listening and transcribing interviews of these three musical figures from the holdings of OHAM.

Curated by Daniella Posy for the Oral History of American Music.

Bookplates, also known as ex-libris, are labels pasted inside the front covers of books to indicate ownership. The Yale Bookplate Collection—one of the largest such collections in the world—is a unique visual archive that forms a timeline of the history and the art of the ex-libris.

This online resource complements the exhibition, Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain's Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole at the Lewis Walpole Library by highlighting archival resources in the library’s collections relevant to an immense range of topics relating to Britain and her Empire in the eighteenth century. It includes images of the manuscripts, rare books, pamphlets, and prints featured in the exhibit together with label texts and essays written by the curators of the physical exhibition.

The Arabic and Persian books displayed in this exhibition are samples of early printed books in the Arabic script. Some of them are printed by the movable type method which was invented by Johann Gutenberg ca. 1439, others are lithographs, i.e. they were produced by a later method of printing called lithography (from the two Greek words lithos “stone” + graphio “to write”).

We think of skimming, scanning, and study aids as the particular intellectual malaise of the internet age, but early modern commentators also worried that tools to faciliate discontinuous reading might enable unacceptable laziness and failures of readerly attention. John Milton complained in 1644 of clergymen who composed sermons with the “infinit helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear.” Cribs and commonplace books, wrote John Selden in 1618, are "excellent instruments for the advancement of Ignorance and Lazinesse." Others were concerned that people weren't reading at all: in an “admonition touching reading” prefaced to a 1594 treatise, Stephen Egerton lamented the “profit and pleasure, businesse, and idleness, matters at home and matters abroad, company, and a thousand occasions” that make the reader “fickle and unfaithfull in forgetting and omitting the times of reading."

Drawing on the early modern and Osborn collections at the Beinecke Library, this exhibit showcases three genres of early modern study aids: the commonplace book, the epitome, and the index. All the objects in the following pages allowed (and perhaps encouraged) readers to access books in ways other than by reading them from cover to cover, through quotations, summaries, and finding aids. As Pierre Bayard asks in How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2007), if a person spends "a certain amount of time on a book—hours, even—without reading it completely...is it fair to say of them that they are talking about a book they haven’t read?" For early modern readers, this was precisely the question.

This exhibit was presented onsite at Yale Divinity Library from November 2017 to June 2018. Upon conclusion of the display onsite, the items were prepared for online exhibit. This exhibit celebrates the arrival of the Andover Newton Theological School archive at the Divinity Library. It spotlights the institutional history and vast special collections and archives of Andover Newton Theological School.

In commemoration of the centennial of America's entry into World War I in April 1917 through to the Armistice in November 1918, partner institutions contributing to the Medical Heritage Library have developed this collaborative online exhibit on medicine, surgery, and nursing in the war, with texts and images drawn from the digital corpus of the MHL. A significant amount of professional medical and surgical literature was produced even as the conflict continued to rage, and many personal narratives of physicians and nurses and histories of hospitals and army medical units were also published in the years immediately after the war. A selection of this material is incorporated into the exhibit.

Medicine in World War I is divided into several broad categories: common diseases of the battlefield and camps; injuries and prosthetic devices; shell-shock and stress; military nursing; and the Spanish influenza epidemic. There are also sections of bibliographic references with links to items in the Medical Heritage Library and a short list of other exhibits devoted to World War I and medicine.