Archives in PA: Archives and Special Collections at Colleges and Universities
College and university archives are open to the public and offer extensive collections helpful for family history.
Pennsylvania is home to hundreds of colleges and universities. Many of these educational institutions have special collections in their libraries, housing materials of interest to genealogists. In this chapter is a comprehensive listing of every sizable archival collection. Penn State University (University Park) and Temple University (Philadelphia) were discussed in Chapter 6: Regional Pennsylvania Archives.
Each institution has an archive dedicated to its own school's history. This can include yearbooks, campus newspapers, professors' papers, dissertations, theses, and memorabilia from student activities. This is valuable for researchers with ancestors who attended or worked at the school. Those of us without collegiate ancestors can also find images and items of the surrounding community preserved in these collections.
Remember to use Chapter 3: Using Catalogs and Finding Aids to develop your research plan. Almost all college and university archives are open to the public for research, usually without a fee. In the listings below, useful genealogy items are noted with "Features".