Special collections in the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro

Institutional bibliographic heritage

Abstract

Special collections can be created for several reasons and are characterized due to these reasons, they’re differentiated in the collection. In libraries. In addition to the values that are listed by the literature to reflect on the formation of special collections, this paper brought the consideration of collections as a bibliographic heritage so that it can then be identified as special. Based on a literature review and on an excerpt from the author’s undergraduate thesis, this paper sought to exemplify what it means for a collection to be seen as an institution’s bibliographic heritage, considering the Guilherme Figueiredo Collection and the Memória da Biblioteconomia Collection, both from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). It is concluded that collections are not born special, but they become special from the context in which they are inserted and in which they are considered, in this paper, the history of UNIRIO and the history of one of its oldest undergraduate courses.