Welcome to “125 Years in the Stacks” – a look at Puget Sound through the prism of its library collections. Think of this as a tour through Collins Library stacks.

Collins Library has been around nearly as long as the Institute itself, and now hold over 425,000 volumes of books and bound journals, plus a sizable collection of federal and Washington state government publications, microforms, and media materials.

This online exhibit took shape during Puget Sound’s 125 anniversary in 2012.  For each year, we shared a single item from the Library’s collections, each item representing one of the years since Puget Sound’s founding in 1888.

Don’t expect the expected. This is not a listing of The 125 Most Important Works Ever Published. While you’re adjusting your expectations, don’t expect 125 uniformly serious items either. Like the Institute itself, Collins Library is unique, and very serious about what they do. But also like the Institute itself – and like other libraries – the Collins can be a bit quirky. And sometimes, we hope, a little surprising.