Old Main, circa 1900
Long before it became an official unit of the CSU Libraries, the Archives and Special Collections Department had its informal beginnings in the nineteenth century when college librarians identified valuable and important books and treated them with special care. Early on, rare books were actively collected by the library including the 1936 purchase of an ancient Babylonian cuneiform clay cone for $15.00. It was in 1959 that a Special Collections Room was first created for housing rare books. The collection shared space with Honors Program students on the first floor of the old library on the Oval.
In 1964, preliminary criteria for inclusion of materials in the Special Collections section had been established, and humanities librarian Austin McLean was given responsibility of the collection. After moving into the new William E. Morgan Library building in 1965, it was reported that Special Collections contained 940 cataloged volumes including 140 in the Imaginary Wars Collection. That same year, Dr. LeMoyne Anderson, Dean of the Library, facilitated the purchase of approximately 10,000 volumes, including rare books, from the Grand Trianon Palace in Colorado Springs. Primarily Belles Lettres (fine literature not scientific or technical in nature), the Trianon collection significantly increased the holdings of the Special Collections Department.
The decade of the 1970s brought noteworthy change to the department. In 1972, Dr. James E. Hansen II of the History Department began to assemble an archive to support research for his book Democracy's College in the Centennial State (Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University, 1977). Its publication enhanced interest in institutional history and enabled many administrators to recognize the value of a centralized archive. In 1975, the State board of Agriculture (now the Board of Governors), formally established the Colorado State University Archive. It was decided that the newly formed Archives should be housed in the Special Collections Department of the University Libraries with Professor John Newman serving as the first University archivist.
Throughout the next twenty-five years, the Archives and Special Collections Department continued to grow through donations such as the Bailey collection of botanical prints and through purchases such as The Palace of Minos (1921) by Sir Arthur Evans and Species Plantarum (1753) by Carolus Linnaeus. Other significant additions to the department included the Sidney Heitman Germans from Russia Collection and the Vietnam War Literature Collection.
With the new century came an ever expanding archival collection which addresses the subjects of water resources and agriculture, areas of particular interest to CSU. In order to accommodate the increasing size of the collections, an Annex was constructed specifically for archival storage. The Department moved the Colorado Agricultural Archive, newly transferred from the Department of History, into this facility in February 2004.