Art History Subject Guide

To begin searching for materials housed in Rose Library, visit our website. Here, you will find information about our various holdings in manuscript collections, archives, and rare books. You may also want to begin to familiarize yourself with our holdings by visiting our Introduction to Collections page.

You can register and request materials through Emory’s Special Collections Request System, AEON.  Once you have found the materials you want to request, use the request links in the finding aid (for manuscript and archives collections) or the catalog record (for print materials in Library Search) to access the request system. You’ll be prompted to register if you do not already have an account. 

The material in archival collections is housed in boxes and folders, and described in documents called Finding Aids. A finding aid will provide you with basic information about a collection's contents, a brief biography of the individual who created the collection, and any information about restrictions on use of the materials. Often, collections are broken down into series; for these collections, the finding aid will also contain a brief description of each series.

Last but not least, a finding aid contains a detailed list of the materials found in a collection. Here is a sample from the finding aid for the Confederate Miscellany collection (MSS20):

As you can see, this finding aid provides you with the names and dates of the letters contained in the collection. Not all finding aids will have this level of detail. A folder might be labeled "Correspondence, 1910-1920," or "Printed Material, Newspaper Clippings." Consider looking through these folders as well, even if you don't immediately know from the folder title that the material is relevant to your research. You never know what you might find!

You can search the Rose Library's finding aids at our website: https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/. To search the collections, enter your search term in the search field.

HINT: Do not place quotes around your search term if using a phrase; our database is currently not capable of processing the quotation marks, and this will keep you from obtaining any search results.

When you find a collection you are interested in using, write down the collection name, its manuscript number (MSS number), and the boxes you would like to see. You can email all of this information to rose.library@emory.edu prior to your research visit!

Rare books that are part of the Rose Library's collection are cited using the same format you will use for general stacks books.

Manuscript Collections have their own form of citation. Different archives or special collections libraries may have slight variations in the way they ask that you cite their materials. For Rose collections, look at the first page of the finding aid, where an archvist has provided the preferred citation format for each collection. Generally, the citation will look at follows:

[identification of item(s)], [name of collection], Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.