The American Musicological Society's purpose is to advance scholarship in the various fields of music through research, learning, and teaching. They were founded in 1943, reflecting trends in musicological scholarship and academic training through the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Penn holds the administrative records, oral history documentation, journal production records, and more.
The Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection is devoted to the history of chemistry and collects broadly in that field, emphasizing periods prior to 1900. The collection includes early and modern works on chemistry, alchemy, early medicine and pharmacology, dyeing, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics; biographies of chemists; works on the chemical industry; and the history of chemical education.
The Gotham Book Mart was a vital bookstore in the New York literary scene from its creation in 1920 to its closing in 2006. In 2008, after the closure of the bookstore, the Penn Libraries received the remaining stock of books, along with papers and other items from this landmark institution.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is a University of Pennsylvania museum displaying contemporary art. This portion of the collection documents the exhibition files of the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 1963 to 2000.
Otto Edwin Albrecht (1899-1984) was an internationally known music bibliographer and professor of romance languages and musicology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Spiritualism, the belief that it was possible for the spirits of the dead to communicate or interact by various means with the living, attracted many adherents in the United States since 1850.
The U.S Health Activism History Collection is a group of archival collections centered on health care, health policy, and medical reform movements. Topics covered in these collections included poverty, civil rights, women's health, and many others. The original collector, Walter J. Lear (1923-2010), was a pioneering LGBT doctor and medical activist.
The Kislak Center holds a number of manuscript collections, an important collection of books by and about Whitman, including a sizeable collection of rare first edition Whitman publications, and three paintings by Herbert Gilchrist, currently on display in the Reading Room.