Collections

The Dale A. Olsen Collection consists of over 800 audio and visual items that span Dr. Olsen's career as a researcher and educator from 1965 to 2007. They contain a variety of music from Japan, China, Indonesia, Persia, Africa, Ireland, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. While most of the recordings chronicle Dr. Olsen's extensive fieldwork in South America with Japanese immigrants and Warao Indians, other recordings include concerts by FSU world music ensembles, student and guest lectures, other special events and ceremonies, private gatherings at home, and even a handful of commercial recordings. About 80 of the reel-to-reel recordings were actually used as audio examples for Olsen's study of the connection of indigenous tribes to their environment, Music of the Warao of Venezuela: Song People of the Rain Forest, winner of the 1997 Alan P. Merriam Prize for "Most Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology."

The Daniel M. Johnson Collection consists of approximately 5,200 books published between the 1780s to 2002 that are by and about Africans and people of African descent. The collection includes many first edition and signed copies as well as pamphlets, articles, letters and photographs. The major categories that Daniel M. Johnson delineated for his collection are: African-American literature and children's literature; African and Caribbean literature; African-American history and critical thought; African, Egyptian, and Middle-Eastern history; and African-American art, music, dance, and sports. The catalog includes 4164 nonfiction books and 907 fiction books.

This collection contains primarily copies of articles that were researched in the writing of The Rise, Fall, and Future of Florida's Citrus Industry. This includes information spanning over one hundred years of this citrus industry's history, with its focus on origin, failure, and success. It also includes manuscript and edited copies of sections of the book itself, as well as annotations and outlines of research.

The collection contains typescripts, correspondence, business files, publicity materials, and novels, which have been removed from the collection and cataloged separately.  Also includes Hagberg's typewriter, which may be found on a shelf adjacent to the collection.

The David Kirby Rare Book Collection contains literature, poetry, chapbooks, and literary magazines from the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. The collection includes first edition, inscribed, and autographed volumes. Authors and poets present in the collection include Janet Burroway, Rudyard Kipling, H.E. Bates, Bin Ramke, and Thomas Hardy, as well as a run of Apalachee Review (originally Apalachee Quarterly) from 1973-1987. The collection also contains letters written to David Kirby from 1967-2016 by authors and poets including Joyce Carol Oates, Leon Edel, and Bruce Jay Friedman.

This collection documents the activitles of Florida Gulf Coast University's Deans Council from July 1995 to May 2003. Materials are mostly textual documents created for meetings such as agendas, minutes, notes, and correspondence.

The Degen Resource Room has an extensive historic playbill collection. The collection consists of playbills of productions from all over the world beginning in 1873. The Degen Resource Room is continuing to catalog this massive collection, so the entire scope of this collection cannot yet be assessed. However, it is estimated that we hold one of the premiere playbill collections in the nation. As cataloging continues to take place, we will be able to ascertain the extent of this very special and unique collection.

The Degen Resource Room holds a large collection of blueprints of shop construction drawings and stage designs. This collection encompasses stage designs for Broadway and off-Broadway productions, touring theatrical productions, prestigious awards shows and television set designs. Currently, over 750 set designs have been cataloged with an estimated 500-750 more to be assessed.