Rare Book & Manuscript Library: Image Collections

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries use virtual exhibitions to disseminate information about our collections and topics of interest to the wider community. Some of these exhibitions are digital versions of physical exhibitions mounted in exhibition spaces in the various libraries, while others are born digital - that is, they have only ever existed virtually. The broad exhibition subject categories presented at the top of the page provide a way of grouping exhibitions by topic.

Compiled by Edward Iungerich Keffer, a Philadelphia dentist and noted amateur musician, the Keffer Collection of Sheet Music contains 2,531 scores ranging in date from ca. 1790 to 1895. The great majority of the items were published in the United States and approximately 1,150 items were produced by publishers in Philadelphia. American sheet music of the nineteenth century provides a fascinating historical record of contemporary social concerns, issues, events, celebrities, and tastes. This record is further enhanced by the prevalent use of illustrations for title pages, including portraits, landscapes, and scenes of battles or local sites of interest.

The Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair comprises over 1,000 items documenting the history of the Dreyfus Affair and its impact on the art, society, and politics of France and the modern world. Assembled by Dr. Lorraine Beitler as a resource for scholars, as a teaching collection for students, and as a traveling exhibition designed to stimulate discussion of the issues of prejudice, racism, and social injustice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has been exhibited around the world.

Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in organizing and shaping Penn from its inception. He was President of the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia from 1749 to 1755, and served continuously as trustee until his death in 1790. The partnership of Franklin and Penn is played out against the background of the creation of both a new republic and of higher education in America. Penn in the Age of Franklin provides access to original documents and manuscripts, printed books and artifacts from both the Penn Libraries and the University Archives - whether it be a letter from Franklin, an issue of Poor Richard, or minutes of the earliest meetings of the Trustees.

A genizah is a storeroom or repository for old, used and damaged books, Torah scrolls, and other documents containing the name of God, whose destruction Jewish tradition proscribes. This web site displays selected holdings of two distinct institutions, Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania, and reunites virtually the dispersed fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Documents from the Cairo Genizah date from the 9th through through the 15th centuries. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic, they catalogue the social, cultural, and religious lives of Jews around the Mediterranean basin.

Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Histories, Plans and Futures is a web presentation of the full content of 86 neighborhood planning surveys prepared and published by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission between 1946 and 1990. These reports contain descriptions of current conditions of housing stock; population trends; property turnover; public transportation; community activity. Recommendations are made for future action.

The English Renaissance in Context (ERIC) is an NEH-funded project (2002) designed to provide scholars and students with access to major texts of the English Renaissance in their original versions. ERIC comprises two units: a set of tutorials on some of Shakespeare's plays and on the making and selling of books during the Early Modern period; and a database of scanned texts from Penn's Furness Shakespeare Library. When used in combination, these two units provide students with a rich introduction to English Renaissance literature in its historical and artifactual context.

The H. H. Furness Memorial Library is devoted to the study of Shakespeare and other Tudor and Stuart dramatists. It includes most writings in English - as well as writings in many other languages - about Shakespeare and virtually all English-language editions of his plays and poems, including the first four folios, some early quartos, and other editions up to the present time. Translations of Shakespeare into many world languages are a special focus of the collection. Promptbooks, biographies, photographs, letters, scrapbooks (with reviews and news reports about Shakespearean performances and performers), and playbills offer rich resources for early stage history. In addition, the Library gathers primary and secondary information about the history of the Renaissance, especially in England but also on the Continent, and Shakespeare's predecessors, contemporaries, and successors among English Renaissance literary writers, particularly dramatists. It also contains more than 2,000 microfilm dissertations on Shakespeare and English drama from the middle ages through the Restoration.

The Morais Ledger belonged to Sabato Morais, a Sephardic Jewish leader, Hebraist, poet, historian, lecturer, teacher, and the leading representative of enlightened Orthodox Judaism in 19th century America. The scrapbook he kept - digitized and searchable here - is a unique record of the path he charted, the time through which he lived, and the highly charged controversies in which he became embroiled.