The Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives contains the most extensive collection of recorded American popular music housed at a university. The library also houses a collection of approximately 2,000 reels of tape and about 1,000 cassettes. One of the special collections on tape includes more than 4,000 hours of old radio shows such as The Shadow, The Green Hornet and Jack Benny. By item count the library has approximately 800 cylinder recordings, 20,000 compact discs and 650,000 disc recordings including 250,000 LP albums, 250,000 45-rpm discs and 110,000 78-rpm records. A supporting collection of reference books, periodicals and various files is also maintained. Opportunities exist for students to work at the Popular Culture and Music Libraries.
Brown is a professor and chair in the Department of Popular Culture and the School of Critical and Cultural Studies at Bowling Green. It is the only university in the U.S. to have an undergraduate and graduate department devoted to the scholarly study of pop culture, according to BGSU.
The library was founded in 1969 and boasts a collection of close to 200,000 cataloged items. With a focus on popular culture post-1876, the collection spans from "nickel weeklies" fiction magazines dating back to the 1890s to the latest edition of TV Guide.
The building, which was designed by state architect Carl E. Bentz, features unique non-objective murals on the east and west facades of the library designed by Don Drumm. Drumm, an artist in residence during the 1960s, actively participated in the conceptualization and construction of the murals. Drumm outlined contemporary designs onto the concrete. Construction crews then sandblasted the designs into the concrete. Drumm added shadow pins to the west mural to capture light and create shadows to complete the mural.[9] The nine-level, 156,895 sq ft structure, is located between Memorial and East Halls.
The William T. Jerome Library is open to the community. The library is a member of OhioLINK, a statewide library and information system that enables BGSU students, faculty and staff to borrow books from other Ohio libraries and to access to many online research databases.
The pure breadth of materials available in the library allows a more-or-less complete view of life: what people are interested in, what they are spending their time making and consuming and even how that information is disseminated at any given time. The library houses a collection of tens of thousands of romance novels alongside other items you might not expect to see in a library, like themed card decks, glassware and other memorabilia. It is also home to one of the largest comic book collections in the nation. Materials like manuscripts and press kits give insights into the creation and marketing of pop culture objects, providing a completely unique perspective that can only be found in a collection like this.
The Bowling Green State University Popular Press was begun by Ray and Pat Browne in 1967 as a means to publish the Journal of Popular Culture. By 1969 the press began to publish books. It was the official mouth-piece of what was then a fledgling movement to promote the academic study of every day life and became one of the foremost university presses to focus the majority of its publishing on topics relevant to this study of popular culture. The Popular Press was sold to the University of Wisconsin in 2002.
That said, as BPCL looks ahead to the future, both during COVID-19 when access to the physical collection is limited and after, the library is looking for opportunities to increase their digital footprint and make their unique collection available to a broader audience. As a state institution, BPCL views its collection as belonging to the entire state of Ohio, not just the university, and they are working hard on increasing access. Their role as an archive is to be respectful of the authors and owners of the material, while also making sure they provide as much access as they can as quickly as they can so more individuals can take advantage of the treasures available in the collection.
At Central Washington, a public university dependent on state funding, engagement with the greater Ellensburg, Wash., community is a priority for its library, Lubas says. The Cultural Conversations program brings together students and community members for lectures by faculty, staff, and students who were born outside the United States but live in Ellensburg.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
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