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A Sheridan Libraries research center mines the rich history of Renaissance books to forge connections with humanities scholars and students
The multiyear project will transform the iconic campus building into an inspiring and welcoming space for 21st-century research and learning.
Library services and a variety of study spaces are available in the MSE Library Annex, located in the former Johns Hopkins Club. We have also added seating to the Hutzler Reading Room in Gilman Gall and new study space to Hodson Hall.
Explore the treasures of the Sheridan Libraries through highlighted special collections, archival materials, and online exhibitions.
Ethel Ennis (1932-2019) was an acclaimed jazz artist who graced some of the most prominent stages in the nation while maintaining a commitment to her hometown, Baltimore. Her husband and partner, Earl Arnett (b. 1940) is a former Baltimore Sun reporter, theater critic, and instructor at Peabody Conservatory. This collection documents their careers, their production company, ENE Productions, and their restaurant/cabaret, Ethel's Place, through recordings, musical arrangements, photographs, artifacts, and other materials. This extensive collection (155 linear feet) is partially processed and will open for research in 2024.
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The United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons and jails—a larger share of its population than in any other nation on earth. Yet there remains widespread ignorance of conditions inside. Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass incarceration, the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts, and voices of incarcerated writers. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing, and disseminating the work of imprisoned people and volunteers, the APWA aims to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best.
Visit the archive
The John and Linda Greene Map Collection contains over 2,000 maps dating from the 1500s to the present. Its multi-century, global focus makes the collection a particularly rich resource for those who study maps used for diplomacy, education, and news.
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While iconic characters like Batman and Spider-Man were mesmerizing readers, an alternate comic book timeline was booming, featuring the adventures of airline stewardess Bonnie Taylor, tragically unhappy actress Lisa St. Clair, and countless other female characters seeking love and fulfilling relationships in the pages of romance comic books. Popular from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, romance comic books introduced teenagers to the joys and heartache of love. The Sheridan Libraries holds over 200 issues, including such titles as "Falling in Love," "Girls' Love Stories," "Teen-Age Romances," and "Young Romance."
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The Comedias Sueltas Collection is a remarkable assortment of more than a thousand ephemeral editions of Spanish plays from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
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There is a thin evidentiary record of archival materials relating to the life of Johns Hopkins. For years, leaders and community members have centered their story of our founder on his benevolent gift to the city of Baltimore: a university and a hospital, and the accepted narrative that he was an early abolitionist. Under the auspices of Hopkins Retrospective and through the Sheridan Libraries, this archive explores and publicly presents archival materials related to the life of Johns Hopkins and his family, including newly discovered census records that provide evidence that Johns Hopkins was a slaveholder during the mid-1800s.
Explore the archive
Documents the Hopkins history through recordings and transcriptions of interviews with members of the Hopkins community. The collection includes both audio and video interviews, and continues to grow as new oral histories are recorded and added.
View in Catalyst
University Archives holds over 20,000 photographs documenting the visual history of Johns Hopkins University from its founding to present.
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The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music contains over 29,000 pieces of American popular music from the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The Hinkes Collection of Scientific Discovery is composed of hundreds of rare books and manuscripts documenting the trajectory of scientific thought from the 15th to 20th centuries. Highlights include the first edition of Galileo’s illustrated treatise on the discovery of sunspots (1613), the first appearance in print of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in a rare paper printed by the Linnaean Society (1858), and a hand-colored copy of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's Atlas Coelestis (1742).
View the collection on Flickr
This June, we at the libraries encourage you to celebrate your identity, your community, and your people! In honor of Pride Month, here is a list of projects, resources, materials […]
Please enjoy this blog post by Sophia Shoulson, PhD candidate in Jewish Languages and Literatures in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, who spent the 2024-2025 year in Technical […]
