Collecting and Managing Popular Culture Material

Abstract

Using the experience of a collecting initiative of ephemeral publications at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library (1997–1998), the author examines the process that was undertaken in collecting, arranging, and cataloging these items at the Library. The focus of the initiative was to increase the holdings on minor league baseball by collecting team publications and ephemera, vital for documenting the history of teams and their interaction with their communities. Additionally, these incoming and existing publications were organized in a manner to provide better access to people coming to the Library. Besides providing the methods used to collect these items, the author provides lessons learned on the fragility of these initiatives, the cost in staff time to manage them, and other issues related to documenting popular culture in society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.