Located on the 2nd floor of the Connelly Library, the Department of Special Collections houses a diverse range of materials, from medieval manuscripts and incunabula to world–renowned subject collections treating contemporary social issues.

In the latter category, Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War is the largest literary collection of its kind in the world, attracting scholars, graduate students, and journalists from across the globe. With more than 18,000 novels, short stories, poetry anthologies, music, and films, the scope of this research collection is unique among universities and museums.

Additional popular culture collections include Imaginative Representations of the Holocaust / Trauma Collections - intentionally allied with our Vietnam collection - and the Life and Work of Bob Dylan - believed to be the only collection of Dylan's work at an academic institution.

Also notable are our 1200 volumes of illustrated Bibles, formally known as the Susan Dunleavy Collection of Biblical Literature, and the Owen Wister papers, consisting of extensive correspondence to and from Wister, a famous American writer of fiction and notable Philadelphian. The Wister family once resided at Belfield estate, the grounds of which make up a portion of La Salle’s campus. The home was originally owned by renowned colonial Philadelphia painter and entrepreneur Charles Willson Peale, the subject of yet another of our collections, and the mingling of the physical history of these two prominent American families on the Belfield Estate makes these collections particularly interesting in situ.