Haverford CollegeLibraries

Quaker & Special Collections welcomes everyone regardless of background, age, affiliation, or the nature of your research; as such, we will not request to see IDs.

Appointments are not required to use materials in Quaker & Special Collections. Visitors traveling from out of town are encouraged to contact staff at hc-special [at] haverford.edu prior to their visit, as this allows us to make sure materials of interest will be available during your visit.

Rules governing the use of materials are designed to protect and preserve collection materials for future research use.

Researcher Responsibilities

• Materials are to be used in the Reading Room.
• Researchers will register and sign in each day and agree to abide by departmental policies.
• We encourage photography for research purposes. Staff will notify researchers of any materials subject to photography restrictions. Please silence cameras, phones, and other devices as a courtesy to other researchers.
• Researchers may bring pencil and paper, laptops, tablets, cameras, phones, and reference materials to the tables, and will store all other personal belongings, including coats, purses, briefcases, pens, food, and water bottles, in the provided lockers.
• We ask that all manuscript and archival materials be kept in the order in which they are received. To assist with this, researchers work with one box and one folder at a time and use a provided placeholder card to keep track of the sequence within each box. Folders and their contents must be kept flat on the table.
• Use of the Reading Room is reserved for those using Quaker & Special Collections materials.
• Access to unprocessed collections and non-reformatted audiovisual materials will be at the discretion of curatorial staff.

Quaker & Special Collections accepts research requests via hc-special [at] haverford.edu (email) (preferred) and phone from those unable to visit the collections. In general, Quaker & Special Collections staff can provide up to half an hour of research free of charge; after that, researchers will need to make other arrangements. Learn more about our reproduction and publication policies below.

If you have a question about materials in a certain collection, visiting the collections, or anything else, please hc-special [at] haverford.edu (contact us).

Reproduction Services

Quaker & Special Collections wishes to facilitate access to collections, and recognizes that reproductions are an important aspect of that process. We will work to meet these needs to the extent that physical conditions, copyright, or other legal restrictions permit.

Researchers in our Reading Room are encouraged to use cameras or cell phones to make reference copies. There is no charge for self-service photography.

We also welcome requests for copies of up to 500 pages per researcher per year. There is no charge for this service. Reproductions are made as PDFs, and delivered via email. We will accommodate specific, smaller requests for high quality tiff images made at 600dpi resolution.

Materials in our collection are governed by copyright law; researchers are welcome to use materials in the public domain and to make fair use of copyrighted materials as defined by law. Determining copyright is the responsibility of the researcher. We do not require payment for permission to publish, but are always interested to hear how our materials are being used. As a matter of good scholarly practice, materials should be noted as being from Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Please include collection or image name and number as available.

Please consult a staff member if you have questions. Requests must be made via our request form. Although we strive to complete requests within two weeks, due to staffing, request queues, and request sizes, some requests can take longer. Requests are processed in order of receipt.

Please contact hc-special [at] haverford.edu ( ) with any questions.