UNLV Special Collections & Archives

SMART CITY senior staff visited the UNLV Lied Library on June 12th, during Smart City Network’s Mid-Year Business review, and toured the Special Collections and Archives. In the photos, we see students involved in the summer program, archiving restaurant menus from not only Las Vegas casinos but from around the World. Mark (President) and Marianne Haley funded the Lied Library student summer program.

Special Collections maintains a photograph collection of over 80,000 individually cataloged images, including black and white prints, color prints, scrapbooks, slides, negatives, color transparencies, and glass plates. Several additional photographs are located in manuscript collections. The photographs primarily document the history of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The department also maintains a nearly comprehensive series of aerial photographs of Las Vegas and other environments from the early 1970s to the present. The photograph collections as a whole date from the turn of the century and are particularly significant in documenting the physical culture and evolution of the city from the late 1940s through the 1970s.

Picture: Custom dinner menu for special event in 1950’s

The majority of the photo collections have inventories listing photo captions that can be searched on the library’s website, https://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/photographs/photos.html.