The earliest extant “special” collection began with Miss Alice Mary Robertson's gift of her personal library in the late 1920s and, in 1931, the bequest of her personal and family papers. Robertson was a granddaughter of Samuel A. Worcester, a missionary to the Cherokee in Georgia before the Trail of Tears. Her parents were missionaries to the Creek. Miss Robertson taught in mission schools (including the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, which eventually became Henry Kendall College and then The University of Tulsa), served as Postmistress of Muskogee, Oklahoma, and was the second woman elected to the United States Congress (1920-1922). Her personal and family papers provide important documentation of Cherokee, Creek, and Oklahoma history, and her bequest established a direction for collecting materials related to Native Americans that continues to this day.
In 1929, when the original part of McFarlin Library was built, the large room in the north end of the second floor (now the Student Study) was planned as a museum space to showcase Alice Robertson's Native American artifacts. Other collections were also acquired to populate what was called the "Indian Museum." Among these were the Ellis Clark Soper Collection, which included Civil War artifacts and western Americana; the Bright Roddy Collection, made up of Navajo weaving and beadwork; and the James Wolfe Collection, composed of artifacts from Borneo. These collections were deaccessioned in the 1940s, with components transferred or sold to other institutions.
A new direction in collection development began with a series of gifts in the early 1960s by members of the Tulsa Bibliophiles, a group of collectors active during the 1950s. As a group, the Bibliophiles set themselves the challenge of collecting Walt Whitman materials, which they donated to The University in 1965. One Bibliophile, Rush Greenslade, gave his splendid collection of Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and 17th and 18th century editions of English writers. These two gifts established a base for more intense collecting of American and British literature to support a doctoral program established in the 1960s. During this same period, several other literary collections were purchased from bookseller and collector John Bennett Shaw.
In 1968, the Rare Book Room was officially established, located on the east side of the 5th floor of McFarlin Library. This space now serves as the Reading Room for Special Collections patrons, and is where researchers may view rare book and manuscript materials.
In 1975, former Tulsa businessman John W. Shleppey considerably enriched the Special Collections holdings with his bequest of the many books and manuscripts by and about Native Americans which he had collected over his lifetime. The collection originally contained nearly 6,000 books, including many rare volumes. In 1989, Special Collections' Cherokee-related holdings were extended with the gift of the J. B. Milam Library of nearly 2,000 volumes. Milam served as Principal Chief of the Cherokee nation from 1941 to his death in 1949.
Special Collections began adding manuscript collections in the 1970s with the purchase of the library and personal papers of British literary critic Cyril Connolly. The manuscripts alone take up over 2000 linear feet. Subsequent acquisitions include the papers and private libraries of literary and artistic figures like James Joyce, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Richard Ellmann, Rebecca West, Anna Kavan, Edith Nesbit, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Sir V.S. Naipaul, among many others.
In 2024, with the generous assistance of funding from the Henneke Society, Special Collections purchased a Treventus ScanRobot 2.0, adding significantly to the department's digitization capabilities. The device can not only scan up to 2,500 pages of bound material in an hour, but is programmed to upload digitized books and periodicals to HathiTrust, a digital consortium of academic libraries sharing more than 17 million texts available to students and scholars.
Today, Special Collections houses over 150,000 volumes and over 5 million pages of manuscripts, sheet music, and photographic collections, in addition to a robust collection of artwork and artifacts.
