James Branch Cabell Library. Special Collections and Archives (VCU Libraries)

Logo for James Branch Cabell Library. Special Collections and Archives
Libraries at Virginia Commonwealth University occupy two main facilities, the James Branch Cabell Library on the Monroe Park Campus and the Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences on the MCV Campus. The VCU Libraries also supports the arts and design library of the VCU campus in Doha, Qatar. The VCU Libraries is a Resource Library in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and a member of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries and the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA), a statewide networking consortium for shared access to electronic and print resources. The Monroe Park Campus is home to most of the University's undergraduate and many of its graduate programs, including the School of the Arts, the College of Humanities and Sciences, and the Schools of Business, Education, Engineering, and Social Work. The MCV Campus includes the schools of allied health professions, dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy as well as the VCU Health System (VCUHS). The VCU Libraries support these programs with over 2.1 million volumes and over 300,000 e-books, more than 51,000 journals, and extensive collections in film, video, sound, comic, manuscript, and book-art.


Strengths:
Collection strengths include the arts, behavioral sciences, business, chemistry, clinical medicine, education, health and life sciences, public affairs, and social work. The collections in Special Collections and Archives on both campuses include rare and specialized book collections numbering more than 50,000 volumes, 5,500 linear feet of manuscript collections, and VCU's official archives. Collections include the papers of numerous Virginia writers, artists, health-care practitioners, social activists, local non-profit and professional organizations, and the Archives of the New Dominion, a collection of historical materials from Virginia's under-documented communities. In addition, VCU Libraries holds nationally-prominent collections in graphic arts, artists' books, and medical artifacts, as well as one of the nation's largest and most outstanding collections related to comic arts, including the archives of the Eisner Awards, the most prestigious national award for comic arts.