Archives & Special Collections is your portal to the University's archives, rare books, manuscripts, historic photos, artifacts, and much more.
Research Support
We're Open Online
We can help with research needs virtually during the Covid-19 outbreak. Archives & Special Collections staff are working remotely. Email us at SpecialCollections[at]scu.edu for the most prompt assistance.
For researchers and students: we have over 50,000 items scanned in our Digital Collections and several Research Guides to help you make sense of it. We can help identify surrogates for known items, or to get started on a research topic. We're available via email, phone, or Zoom video conferencing. We may be able to offer virtual material consultations after mid July using a document camera.
View three videos on searching the Digital Collections.
For faculty anticipating class planning: we are prepared to transition archival and rare material instruction into the virtual environment using digitized material, digital humanities tools, and live or pre-recorded virtual material consultations. We can also embed learning activities into Camino.
Digital Collections
We have scanned nearly 50,000 images and documents from our collections for you to access online. Search across all collections, or target your search to some of the popular collections listed below.
- The Santa Clara Student Newspaper
- SCU Yearbooks
- SCU Course Catalogs
- Mission Santa Clara Manuscripts
- Mission Santa Clara Sacramental Records
- Full text scans of baptism, marriage, and burial records. Click Browse All at top of page to replicate the experience of leafing through the bound records by hand.
Arthur's Attic
Arthur's Attic is the blog of Archives & Special Collections, where we share interesting items and discuss topics related to our collections. The blog is named after Arthur Spearman, University Archivist from 1957-1977, who we attribute to assembling many of our bedrock collections.