By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Behind the closed doors on the fourth floor of Jerome Library, the treasures are stored.
Treasures that most people, aside from the hoarders and most obsessive of collectors, would throw out.
For archivist Stephen Ammidown, that’s the beauty of the Browne Popular Culture Library. Most of what it collects would be destined for the landfill, except someone saved it, and then they, or their survivors, donated it to Bowling Green State University.
Those folks include a family who recently traveled all the way from Saskatchewan with a van full of movie and gossip magazines. Those now sit on a table in the library in the process of being sorted.
Some donations are small — an MTV Remote Control game. “I want you to have this,” the donor said.
One Star Trek fan delivered dozens of boxes filled with all things Star Trek, including a Vulcan harp, that was made by a fan of the show.
Ammidown said Star Trek is an interesting case because the studio lost interest in it in the period between the original TV series and the movies, and didn’t license official products. So Star Trek lovers ran amok creating memorabilia on their own, including that harp.
The instrument is not only unplayable but unrepairable, yet valuable nonetheless as a relic of the show and its devotees.
The Browne Popular Culture Library celebrated its 50th birthday with a cake decorated with Batman , Tuesday afternoon (March 12). (Batman’s 80th birthday will be celebrated at the Batman in Popular Culture conference on campus, April 12 and 13.)
“Seems like a 100 years,” quipped Bill Schurk, who was the first head librarian of the Popular Culture Library.
He remembered as an undergraduate in the 1960s being allowed to display some of his collections of “cool stuff” at McFall, where the university library was then located. That was a privilege reserved for faculty and library staff.
“I was this library when I was 5 years old,” Schurk said Tuesday. “I collected all of this then.”
After earning his masters in library science he returned to BGSU to head a new audio center.
University Library Director A. Robert Rogers knew Schurk well both as a student and as a student assistant, so when the Popular Culture Library was opened in conjunction with the new major in Popular Culture started by Ray Browne, Schurk was tapped to head the library then on the first floor of Jerome Library.
“I understood the material,” Schurk said. That set him apart from other librarians.
Starting the collection also “opened the floodgates,” he said, for also collecting popular music — Laverne Baker, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the like. About a decade later the Sound Recordings Archives was created to house that music collection. Schurk headed the archives, which now bears his name.
Jean Geist worked in the Popular Culture library for 18 years before her retirement in 2003.
She recalls that when she arrived there were boxes everywhere, packed with donations, and the stacks were open for anyone to wander. Movie posters were in the back near a door.
When the library was sorting and pruning its collection, it found multiple issues of Playboy with the centerfolds missing.
All that has changed. While there’s always material to sort through like that collection of gossip magazines, most is categorized in some fashion.
Ammidown noted the difficulty of finding a way to organize the large collection of postcards. Every few years, it gets resorted.
Only library staff and a few researchers are allowed to venture into the stacks. Usually a staff member will fetch what a patron needs.
Ammidown said that the Browne library has a broad selection of material that includes such quotidian items as Sears catalogs and even a selection of junk mail.
The library has the largest collection of material related to romance novels, not just the books, but manuscripts, correspondence, and cover art.
In a crate in the stacks rest 130 original paintings by Frank Kalan created for Harlequin. Ammidown said the library hopes to get another 150.
Nancy Down, head librarian, said the kind of material that shows the process from draft to reviews of the published book is what’s most valuable to researchers. “You get to see how the sausage is made,” she said.
“People from all over the world come to the fourth floor of Jerome library,” said Chuck Coletta, who teaches popular culture courses at the university.
One of those scholars drawn to BGSU because of the Browne collection is Buddy Avila, a doctoral student in American Culture Studies who works as a graduate research assistant in the library.
He’s studying how comic books dealt with the AIDS/HIV crisis just as it was emerging in the 1980s and 1990s.
For him being able to actually look at the same books that someone bought at a newsstand is like traveling back in time. This experience gives a more visceral link to what people of the time were thinking.
The library, though, also has to consider what scholars may be interested in 20 years from now, Down said.
The challenge remains that what they’ll want to study in the future may not be valued in the present, she said. So collecting requires a bit of prognostication.
Also, Down said, so much of popular culture now exists only in bits and bytes. Librarians and archivists are still trying to figure out how to preserve these “born digital” products.
That requires not just collecting, Down said, but developing the infrastructure to preserve the “cool stuff” of now for future scholars.
Geist recalled that among the students she supervised rumors persisted that the stacks on the fourth floor were haunted. Geist didn’t outright dismiss the tales.
“We have all the stuff from grandma’s attic,” she said, “so maybe grandpa’s back there, too.”
