UNLV Libraries Special Collections & Archives

Special Collections & Archives has officially transitioned to summer hours!

The Reading Room is open Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. for researchers, students, faculty, and community visitors.

Planning a visit? in advance. We encourage you to check our hours and prepare in advance. Reference questions can be sent anytime to [email protected].

Learn more: https://www.library.unlv.edu/whats-new-special-collections/2026/2026-05/special-collections-archives-summer-hours.html

You may not know Robert Scott Hooper by name, but his gaze has shaped impressions of Sin City for decades.

For more than 40 years, the prolific photographer documented the city’s entertainers, architecture, spectacle, and visual culture. His images appeared in magazines, newspapers, and playbills, and on billboards, postcards, taxicabs, and other pieces of visual commentary on the city’s cultural landscape.

Now, that legacy has found a permanent home at UNLV. The Robert Scott Hooper Photograph Collection preserves decades of material documenting both the photographer’s career and the evolving identity of Las Vegas.

Read more about this new collection.

The Photographer Behind Las Vegas’ Image The Robert Scott Hooper Photograph Collection at UNLV preserves decades of celebrity portraiture, commercial imagery, and the changing visual culture of Las Vegas.

Please join us for Sunday research hours this May 10 from 12-5 in Special Collections and Archives. If you can't make it in - please check out our new website at https://library.unlv.edu/sca

This is a small portion of books from our Mavis Eggle Books as They Were Bought Collection (MS-01144).

Thanks for going on this 2026 Preservation Week journey with us! We are grateful to our conservator Jay Tanner for making these posts possible!

Sometimes objects suffer losses. Here, our conservator was able to fill the loss with a printed color fill on Japanese repair tissue. This fill was done so that it can be reversed in the future if needed, but helps blend the aesthetics of the cover. -week

It’s preservation week! One of the ways our conservator gets things in the lab for treatment is if we get a digitization request. Here, our conservator is preparing this map for flattening so it can be safely digitized!

Sometimes old repairs are evidence of an objects past. These old repairs often call for difficult decisions. In the case of this book, it has been decided to leave this book as an artifact of its past.

We're at the tail end of Preservation Week but we still want to show off some of the work of our conservator, Jay Tanner. Hope you enjoy these informative posts about his work!

Pressure sensitive tape may have been the norm in the past, but today it is a nightmare for any conservator. This book on Philosophy from 1802 was completely covered in brittle, yellowing tape.

Coming back into the office after the holidays can often be a challenge. Our Technical Services staff was working on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Office of Media Relations Records, 1969-2003. UA-00036, and found this photo which is a perfect visual representation of how many of us feel today!

We’re having a blast at Heritage Holidays at the Clark County Museum! Stop by and say hello! Thanks so much to our colleague Stacey Fott who was also a part of the event but managed to evade the lens of the paparazzi! 📸

In celebration of Archives Month and Day, our staff is ready to answer your questions about archives and archivists. Do you want to know the basics of how to organize a box of documents, or your own digital files? Maybe you're interested in preserving your family photo albums both physically and digitally. Or would you like to know more about what it's like to be an archivist? Are you curious about the tasks involved in a typical day's work as an archivist? Perhaps you want to know more about our collections - ask a question in the comments below today and we will do our best to answer it in a timely manner.