Formats Collected

The Hay strives for its collections to be a robust source of material for scholarly inquiry, artistic production, and public interest. The collections include numerous writing systems and textual formats from Europe, the Middle East, and North America, ranging from cuneiform tablets from 2000 BCE to 21st century web content and a growing collection of oral histories. The Library respects indigenous and traditional knowledge and seeks to form partnerships with community members to support scholarship, knowledge creation, and cultural preservation. Formats represented in the Hay’s collections include:

• Manuscripts
• Books and published material (periodicals, ephemera, pamphlets)
• Born-digital material (e-mail, computer files, websites, social media, and more)
• Audio-visual recordings
• Oral histories
• Photographs
• Artists books
• Broadsides
• Artwork
• Three-dimensional objects
• Material culture

The Library welcomes items in all of the formats listed above while being carefully selective about the artwork, material culture, and three-dimensional objects accepted because of the unique storage, preservation, and handling needs associated with those formats.