Open Access
Special Collections are often referred to as hidden collections. They require a special environment, careful handling and labor intensive description work to make them available. In the time it takes to process a small collection of photographs I suspect a book cataloger could catalog about 250 books.
WKU’s Special Collections are over 75 years old and we are just now beginning to gain ground in opening our hidden collections with the help computer technology. KenCat is your portal into our world of special collections. Since purchasing this software in 2005 we have created descriptions of over 56,000 items housed in the Kentucky Building. There are rare books on all sorts of topics, books about Kentucky, maps, photographs, documents, oral histories, blueprints, postcards, newspapers, memorabilia, letters, diaries and much more.
KenCat went live late in 2007 and searches have been steadily increasing since that first year from 2 to 21,566 so far this year. We will continue to reveal more and more of our treasures in the years to come.