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The Smith College Special Collections is made up of three repositories: College Archives, Sophia Smith Collection, and the Mortimer Rare Book Collection.

College Archives (CA)

The College Archives collects materials that document the life of the College, its faculty, students, alumnae, and staff. Materials range from documents produced by employees of the College in the course of College business; materials documenting the support of academic enterprises of faculty and students; and unpublished material produced by undergraduate and graduate students during the course of their academic careers at Smith, including material that was produced during off-campus academic programs, such as Smith’s Junior Year Abroad programs.

Sophia Smith Collection (SSC)

The Sophia Smith Collection is a repository of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. It was founded in 1942 to be the library's distinctive contribution to the college's mission of educating women. Today, the Collection consists of over 700 collections (over 10,700 linear feet) of material in manuscript, print, and audiovisual formats. The holdings document the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present. Subject strengths include birth control and reproductive rights; women's rights; suffrage; the contemporary women's movement across race, class, and sexual orientation; U.S. women working abroad; the arts, especially theatre; the professions, especially journalism and social work; and middle-class family life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.

Mortimer Rare Book Collection (MRBC)

The Mortimer Rare Book Collection includes the College’s rare printed books, medieval manuscripts, literary archives, artists’ books, and other historical and cultural materials. The collection scope is chronologically and geographically broad, with substantial holdings in English and American literature, botany, history of science, economics, early children's literature, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English drama and political pamphlets, early lithographic books, and artists’ books. While the focus of the collection has been printed books, there is also an array of other formats in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection. We hold 370 cuneiform tablets dating to 2700 B.C.E., as well as literary and historical manuscripts, including the literary papers of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.

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