By Jennifer Meekhof, SAA President
The student chapters of SAA and ALA at SLIS recently toured the Browne Pop Culture Library and the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives at Bowling Green State University. The tour began with the Browne Pop Culture Library, which holds a collection of over 190,000 books for pop culture studies at the university. The tour began with an introduction to the library which was founded in 1969 and is the most comprehensive repository of its kind in the United States. The tour continued in to the closed stacks starting with the collection of mail-order catalogs and continued with dime novels, nickel weeklies, fanzines, comic books and graphic novels, posters, television scripts, postcards, literary manuscripts, movie and pulp magazines.
The tour concluded at the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives. After walking through the remote listening center and reading room, we began the last part of the tour in an equipment room, from where a researcher's music selections are streamed to the listening center. The Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives contains materials related to the study of music, including recordings, cassette tapes, LPs, books, scores, etc. The library and archives holds over 700,000 recordings in all ranges of musical styles. Similar to other institutions, the library and archives experience issues having enough space for everything; to the point that the librarians sadly have to end their book and music sale in order to gain more space for permanent collections.
Highlights from the tour include a Godzilla alarm clock, the Spiderman collection, cramming about all SLIS students in the elevator, the Sound Recordings reading room with a jukebox and records hanging from the ceilings, and the Life Cereal box that held a plastic record prize .