Special Collections and University Archives: Photographs and Prints

Photographs and prints together form a pictorial collection numbering in excess of 200,000 images, including several thousand postcards. New Jersey scenes and people are especially well documented, as are images relating to United States history through the Civil War.

All of the prints and photographs are stored in closed stacks and must be requested via call slips at the New Jersey Room reference desk.

A portion of our photographic and print holdings are available digitally; see the "Online Resources" section for these and other digital images. Our Digital Resources Subject Guide may also be useful. This guide will be updates as more visual material is digitized.

Thank you to Ilya Slavutskiy, PhD candidate in the Rutgers Department of History, for his work on this guide.

Where to Begin

QuickSearch

The Rutgers Libraries catalog, known as QuickSearch, is the best place to begin your research. The QuickSearch search box can be found on the Special Collections & University Archives homepage and many other Rutgers Libraries pages.

There are also detailed instructions for how to conduct a basic search in QuickSearch on the SC/UA website under “How to search the library catalog.”

Once you conduct a broad keyword or subject search, you can limit your search to SC/UA or any other specific libraries by clicking on “Library” on the left side of the page, and selecting a specific library from the drop-down list. 

Special Collections & University Archives website

Under Research Tools and Resources, select “Search Our Collections” for information on the most comprehensive ways to search our holdings that are not necessarily findable through QuickSearch.

You can also browse finding aids for manuscripts and other archival collections at http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/ead/. Finding aids are simply detailed guides that allow researchers to get a sense of and locate materials in a collection of documents (in other words, not printed books, journals, maps, etc., but the records of a person, business or organization). They are used by special collections and archives globally as a standard way to create access to collections.