The Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts has won an Association of College and Research Libraries award for its catalog for the 2015 exhibition “The Images Affair: Dreyfus in the Media, 1894-1906.”

The ACRL’s Leab Exhibition Awards are given out annually in recognition of excellence in the publication of catalogs and brochures that accompany exhibitions of library and archival materials.

The full color, illustrated exhibit catalog produced by André Dombrowski, a Penn professor of history of art, and his students was cited by the awards committee for taking “an innovative approach to an historical event by examining it through the visual culture that surrounded it.” The committee lauded the catalog’s  “subtle, but beautiful and unifying graphic design elements and the significance of the fact that such an excellent catalog was the result of a student-curated exhibition.”

The Libraries’ exhibit examined the wrongful conviction for treason, and eventual exoneration, of Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus as it played out in the French media in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Nearly all of the items in the exhibit, which included illustrated press, broadsheets, photography, postcards, films and even board games, were from the Libraries’ Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair, one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.