The University Archives and Special Collections have been established to support the teaching and learning mission of the University of South Carolina Upstate as well as to collect, organize, preserve, and make available materials of permanent institutional and historical value to the University and the local community. We focus our collecting efforts on the ten-county upstate area of South Carolina, provide hands-on instruction in the use of primary source materials, and make our collections and materials available to researchers, students, and individuals on site at the USC Upstate Library and digitally via the South Carolina Digital Library (SCDL). The Archives will work cooperatively with public libraries, college libraries, and other cultural heritage organizations in our region to establish joint collection development guidelines and policies, to avoid duplication of others’ collections.
Please see the full University Archives and Special Collections Mission Statement and Collection Development Policy found at the bottom of this page.
The Archives of the Upstate are a separate entity from the University Archives and are an official and final repository for historical records that fall within our collection development policy. The materials may directly relate to the ten counties of upstate South Carolina: Abbeville, Anderson, Cherokee, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg, and Union. Other materials and collections support academic programs and units across campus as well as the teaching mission of the university, whether they directly relate to the ten counties of the upstate region or not.
Several collections that fall within this area are: the American Legion Auxiliary Unit 28 Scrapbook Collection; the Beaumont E Newspaper Collection (digital and print editions); and the Talking to the Moon Oral History Collection. All of these collections have complete finding aids available in USC Upstate's ArchivesSpace finding aid repository.
Included in the University Archives are campus newspapers, departmental collections, yearbooks, schedules, campus directories, photos, copies of faculty publications, official university records and meeting minutes, self-studies, and various collections of memorabilia and ephemera. Some notable collections within the University Archives are the Faculty Senate and General Faculty Meetings, the Shoestring Players Collection of student theatre productions, and the University Athletics Collection which contains statistics and scorebooks, media guides, photos, ephemera, and other items covering the history of USC Upstate's eleven different collegiate competitive sports programs. All of these collections have complete finding aids available in USC Upstate's ArchivesSpace finding aid repository.