Notable Collections

The Marlboro Music School and Festival Records spans Marlboro’s history from 1950 through 2013.

The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture collections include the Society's records, beginning with its 1785 founding, and its extensive library.

The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive is among the most important resources in the world for the study of Jewish culture, folklore, history, linguistics, and literature through the medium of sound.

Rudolf Serkin was an American classical pianist known as one of the 20th century’s greatest soloists and for fostering a vibrant culture of chamber music via the Marlboro Music School and Festival.

The Khajistan collection showcases Pakistani cultural heritage through ephemera, popular magazines, pulp fiction, rare books, and more.

The Weigle Judaica and Ancient Near Eastern Studies (JANES) Reading Room's non-circulating holdings support intensive, text-centered forms of critical scholarship. Significantly, the provenance of the core collection traces back to the personal libraries of some of the greatest scholars of the "Pennsylvania Tradition of Semitics" at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over 2,500 original drawings, notebooks and scrapbooks, correspondence, books, posters, and other materials by the artist William Steig (1907-2003).

Because of longstanding collection strengths in area studies as well as because of disciplinary trends recognizing philosophers outside of the traditional western canon, the Penn Libraries have a significant amount of material relating to philosophy and philosophers in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.