We are thankful that the community frequently thinks of Special Collections as a possible home for their cherished books, Penn State materials, and manuscript collections! Donations are critical to ongoing collection development initiatives and considered on a case-by-case basis by members of our curatorial team who decide if your donations fit the scope of our current collection policies and enrich our mission of teaching and research. In order to better serve our prospective donors during a time of limited capacity, we have created an online form to help us manage our workflow. We ask all prospective donors to read this page and fill out the form as completely as possible.

Unfortunately, we can't always accept everything that is offered to us and we may decline certain donations. We might already have a large collection of materials on a specific topic and the curatorial team has decided to shift collecting priorities to help support other research interests. Other reasons may be related to limited storage space and collections that have reached capacity, such as the La Vie yearbooks or the Fred Waring papers. For an outline of our current collecting scope, please see the Collections Development Plan.

If you are thinking about donating something to Special Collections, please retain your materials, submit the form linked above, and await reply from one of our curators. Please note that it could take a few weeks for a reply due to current capacity constraints. We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding as we work through our queue to your offer.