Distinctive Collections

Our Distinctive Collections contain unique, rare, and/or original materials in many formats, including letters, diaries, videos, scrapbooks, and letterpress volumes. The special nature of such collections often makes their care, preservation, and accessibility challenging and expensive. Our goal is to showcase and share these unique treasures with the MIT community and researchers around the world. A few examples:

• Digitize and preserve the special collections and research materials of renowned MIT faculty
• Acquire audio-visual materials that document current and historical academic and other events at MIT, research outcomes, courses, and related content
• Preserve and digitize at-risk rare books, antique maps, travel guides, and multimedia
• Digitize nearly 74,000 MIT theses and dissertations that remain available only in print
• Digitize selected archival records, and technical reports from MIT labs for use in MIT classes

We hope you will consider a gift in support of Distinctive Collections.

Giving Story
Libraries Digitize Indigenous Language Recordings
Distinctive Collections preserved linguist Kenneth L. Hale’s audio recordings, which include field recordings, language lessons, and other documentation of the endangered languages that he studied. Discover how the team partnered with language communities on the long-term stewardship of the recordings.