Welcome to the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. Housed on the campus of Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ, the Collection serves the research and informational needs of music fans, scholars, authors and others with a serious interest in Bruce Springsteen’s life and career.
With materials dating from 1927 to the present, the Collection includes approximately 30,000 holdings in multiple formats: books, songbooks, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, newspaper articles, historic memorabilia, CDs, vinyl recordings, posters, DVDs and videos.
To date the Collection includes documents originating in 48 countries, reflecting the enduring international interest in Springsteen’s music and live performances. The countries represented include: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, UK, Uruguay, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.
The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection originated in the summer of 2001 with a concern over the rate at which magazine and newspaper articles on Springsteen’s early career, once plentiful, had become increasingly scarce. To address this problem, the Springsteen fanzine, Backstreets Magazine, organized a fan-to-fan campaign to collect and organize essential documents from each phase of Springsteen’s career, ensuring that the historic record would be publicly accessible to all who have a serious interest in Bruce Springsteen’s life and career.
On January 10, 2017, a new partnership to create The Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music was announced. We envision a future that exponentially builds upon our ability to provide scholars, students, and fans from around the globe, public access to an expansive array of archives and programming. The Center will be the destination for stimulating academic discourse and discussion, and will provide entertainment, knowledge, and insight into the works of Bruce Springsteen and other legendary figures of American music.