American Popular Culture
Scope
This overview deals with the popular culture of the peoples of the United States. Popular culture is defined here as popular written literature and broadcasting, popular music, popular dance and theater, certain decorative arts, sports and recreation, and other cultural aspects of social life distinguished by their broad-based presence across ethnic, social, and regional groupings.
For students of popular culture, books and magazines are important, as are music and recorded sound, television and radio broadcasts, prints and photographs, motion pictures, newspapers, and a variety of artifacts and archives. More conventional library materials such as popular magazines may be interesting for popular culture research for their illustrations, advertisements, and representations of everyday life. Many materials that might be useful for popular culture research are not collected by the Library. Such materials include trade catalogs, (unpublished) advertisements, greeting cards, political ephemera, and objects and artifacts generally.
Size
It is impossible to estimate the size of the Library's popular culture collections given both the diffuseness of the subject and the lack of a universal definition of popular culture. In addition to monographs, the Library owns many thousands of newspaper and serial titles, including many popular magazines from all periods; extensive collections of manuscript materials, many of which have some relevance to American popular culture; and very extensive collections of non-book materials useful to the study of American popular culture. These include documentary photographs, prints, maps, audio formats and oral histories, sheet music, television, newsreel, and motion picture materials, as well as a small collection of contemporary American software and other electronic products.
General Research Strengths
The Library's status as the nation's copyright deposit library has meant that the Library's collections have historically been more eclectic and more democratic than many comparable academic research institutions. Although publications that are strictly vanity press materials are normally excluded from the Library's collections, the Library has distinguished (and historically continuous) collections of mass-market fiction and magazines, self-help, humor, and advice books, popular philosophy and theology, as well as a collection of comic books.
Foreign materials held by the Library are useful not only for the study of U.S. culture from foreign perspectives, but also for comparative studies of U.S. and other historical, national, and regional cultures.
Areas of Distinction
One of the most distinguished collections of the Library in popular culture is the large collection of American children's literature. Although extensive damage and loss have been identified in this collection in recent years, the Library's Children's Literature Center has a good collection of "pop-up" books for children, and the collection is enhanced by the presence of large numbers of foreign children's books for comparative purposes.
The Library's collections are strong in most areas of popular fiction, and recent changes in collecting policy have led to a decision to keep (though not yet organize) collections of trade paperbacks in typical American genres such as romance novels, mysteries, science fiction, westerns, and so on. The Library's collection of small and alternative press publications is not as extensive as other archives and libraries, although the Library has a number of microform collections for materials not owned in the original. The Library's collections of pulp novels and the comic book collections also merit mention. Only in recent years did the Library attempt to acquire "counterculture" materials; in addition to some ephemeral materials, these include a collection of posters in the Prints and Photographs division, and a number of newspaper format materials held in the Serial and Government Publications Division.
The Library's collections of sports and recreation materials are quite strong, particularly in serial publications. The Prints and Photographs Division owns a fine collection of baseball cards from the early 20th century. In the decorative arts, the Library's collections are quite comprehensive, especially in 19th- and 20th-century trade journals, and in individual monographs covering a specific topic. Microformat collections of trade catalogs from other institutions supplement LC's collections. The Library's collections of pattern books and guidebooks on a variety of needlework and handwork are also valuable resources.
The American Folklife collections are well known for their breadth; ranging from original and wax cylinder recordings to an extensive collection of sheet music, the Library's folklife collections are unsurpassed.
The Library has important and often unique collections of American documentary photographs and popular prints and illustrations. Collections of popular sound recordings, feature films, sheet music, are all extremely strong.
Weaknesses/Exclusions
In general, the Library's collections are unparalleled. The Library did not collect science fiction or paperback-only fiction titles until very recently, so historical collections are weak. Many popular titles (in a variety of subjects and genres) are missing or damaged. The Library excludes most contemporary trade catalogs from its current collecting policies.
