Science fiction libraries and museums
With the growth of science fiction studies as an academic discipline as well as a popular media genre, a number of libraries, museums, archives, and special collections have been established to collect and organize works of scholarly and historical value in the field.
Key collections
The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation is a leading collection of science fiction. It was founded in Toronto in 1970 by Judith Merril. This public library collection contains over 63,000 items, including books, magazines, audiovisual works, original manuscripts, and other items of interest to both casual users and academic researchers.Paul Allen and Jody Patton founded the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in 2004, located at the base of Space Needle in Seattle. Prominent authors such as Greg Bear serve as advisers to the museum.
An important museum of the genre is Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, housing a large collection of literature relating to science fiction, utopias, and extraordinary journeys. It was founded by the French encyclopedist Pierre Versins in 1976 and now owns over 70,000 books, as well as many other items related to science fiction and its imagery.
List of archives, libraries, museums, and collections
Research collections
- lending library of over 20,000 volumes of speculative fiction at Eastern New Mexico University. Includes archival materials from authors.
- , Special Collections and Archives, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool
- , University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections Dept.
- at The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
- , Toronto Public Library
- ; includes,, and Science Fiction Writers of America depository
- ;
- lending library of over 12,000 volumes of speculative fiction at the California Institute of Technology
- , Temple University Libraries, including a significant
- Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
- Northern Illinois University. Science Fiction Writers of America depository, pulps, and collects the papers of current SF authors.
- University of Delaware's Special Collections, including the "Roland Bounds Science Fiction Collection"
- Georgia Tech's
- Texas A&M University's
- San Diego State University's
- at the
- at the, University of Kansas
- public library founded 2010 by :de:Helmuth W. Mommers, holding 50,000 volumes mainly in German, including a broad collection of German "Dime Novels"
- , San Francisco Public Library
- collects science fiction in English and German and has archival collections from Willy Ley and Robert Forward.
- , Ursula C. Schwerin Library, New York City College of Technology
- is a collection of 28,000 hardcover books, paperbacks, pulp magazines and other materials collected by the late Bob Gibson and donated by his son Andrew. These items can be viewed in the archive and portions of the collection have been digitized.
Museums
- Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle, Washington, founded in 2004.
- Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
- Museum of Science Fiction, Washington, DC, founded in 2013 with a goal of becoming the world's first comprehensive science fiction museum.
Important databases and portals
- , the University of Liverpool Library's "Science Fiction Foundation" collection
- , Texas A&M University, College Station; A freely available online resource designed to help students and researchers locate secondary sources for the study of the science fiction and fantasy and associated genres; these include: historical material; books; articles; news reports; interviews; film reviews; commentary; and fan writing.
- , University of Kansas
- , the Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase
- maintained by The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction
- , a growing wiki of the locations of SF writers' papers, crowd-sourced by librarians.