Heritage Collections
The Dunedin Public Libraries network has two specialist Heritage Collections. Both are located on the third floor of the City Library.
The McNab New Zealand Collection contains around 83,000 items concerning the history of the New Zealand and Pacific regions. The Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection contains around 10,000 items dating from the tenth century to the present, covering literature, religion, and the history of the book.
The Reed Collection's illuminated Mediaeval manuscripts are one of the most outstanding assemblies of European visual art from the Middle Ages in Australasia. With the Otago Museum's holdings of Classical art, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's collections of Mediaeval, Renaissance and later European art, they are a key element in the city's reconnaissance of European art, which is unparalleled in New Zealand. In Australasia it is only matched in Melbourne.
The heritage collections are open to the public, but items can only be used on the third floor of the City Library. There is also a collection of art works used to embellish spaces within the libraries.
Read more about this topic: Dunedin Public Libraries
Famous quotes containing the words heritage and/or collections:
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)