The Coolidge-Consumerism collection assembles a wide array of Library of Congress primary-source materials from the 1920s, some 17,000 pages reflecting the prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass-consumer economy, and the role of government in this transition. While a great deal has been written and made available about the Great Depression and the decade of the thirties, less attention has been devoted to the economic and political history of the twenties. This collection provides a means of filling that gap. The project is supported by Laurance Rockefeller, a member of the Library's Madison Council.
The rise of a mass-consumer economy -- and its problems -- is an especially apt focus for the collection. Students and scholars, as well as general readers, will be able to explore some of the ways in which the 1920s laid the groundwork for our own consumer and information-age culture. The focus on mass consumerism permits the showcasing of products, such as automobiles, radios and convenience gadgets, with which users, both students and adults, have an ongoing fascination and identification.
Senior research consultant Carren O. Kaston "curated" the collection and wrote the introduction and other annotative materials, with assistance from an advisory committee of six historians. Susan Porter Benson, University of Connecticut at Storrs, is a historian of early department stores, gender and labor history, working-class consumption, and the family economy in the 1920s and 1930s. Presidential historian Robert Ferrell, professor emeritus, Indiana University at Bloomington, is writing a new account of the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. James Flink, professor emeritus, University of California at Irvine, is a specialist in automotive history and technology. Ellis Hawley, professor emeritus, University of Iowa, has devoted much of his career to the economic and cultural history of 1920s America. Susan Smulyan, Brown University, specializes in the early history of radio, its technology and business context. Joe William Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University, is a scholar of African-American economic and labor history of the first half of the 20th century.
Manuscript Division specialists John Haynes and Marvin Kranz served in a much appreciated advisory capacity within the Library. Library consultant Emily Lind Baker served as the project's production manager and associate researcher, and Janice Hyde conducted valuable additional research. Preparation of the collection is further indebted to assistance from many American Memory staff people and technical contractors.
In the past, American Memory has reproduced, either in entirety or in large blocks, Library archival holdings that existed as preestablished collection entities. Examples have been African American Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, or Documents from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. The selective thematic focus and range of formats in the Coolidge-Consumerism collection represent a new effort to assemble topical bodies of material, applying a more active editorial hand. The planners believe the entire American Memory corpus will be strengthened by a mix of archival and topical collections.
Access to the Coolidge-Consumerism Collection is provided in three modes:
1. The Interactive Historical Introduction will be especially helpful to users new to the collection's subject matter and to library research, both secondary school students and interested adults. The main narrative in the introduction is presented in an overview and a series of texts called INTRO NOTES (INTRO NOTE Menu to the Historical Introduction). In addition, hypertext links provide access to detailed, supplemental historical DETAIL NOTES, providing more information about people, organizations and events important during the 1920s (DETAIL NOTE Menu to the Detail Notes).
This Interactive Historical Introduction highlights the contents of the Coolidge-Consumerism collection, sketching out principal subthemes and offering a broad sampling of available titles relevant to these subthemes. The INTRO NOTES do not, however, comment in an exhaustive way upon the subthemes nor refer to each and every item in Coolidge-Consumerism. Instead, they offer observations on the subthemes in relation to the titles in the collection and call users' attention to salient interconnections that the material may illuminate.
2. The Archival Directory presents the multi-media collection in terms of the format and location of the original items at the Library of Congress. Manuscript items are presented in one group, photographs in another, books and periodicals in a third and fourth, and a limited selection of motion picture and recorded sound material in a fifth. This online archive is itself introduced by a narrative text called DIRECTORY NOTES (DIRECTORY NOTE Menu to the Directory of Documents in the Collection), which also contains hypertext links to other parts of the collection. Researchers may also bypass the Directory Notes and go directly to any title in the collection.
Readers should bear in mind that the narratives of the three sets of notes -- INTRO NOTES, DETAIL NOTES, and DIRECTORY NOTES -- highlight only selected titles. No effort has been made to comment upon all items included in the Coolidge-Consumerism collection. Their discovery has been left to the user.
3. Search by Word or Term offers a mode of access analogous to interrogating a library catalog or other database. At one level, a search will look across the collection's bibliographic records or catalogue for names, locations, dates, or terms. At another level, users may search for words and terms within individual texts and in the editor's annotations that accompany the texts. Through word or term searches, all items in the collection can be accessed.
Machine-searchable texts have been supplied for most of the longer or more complicated items in the collection. Generally speaking, material that is relatively brief or of a kind that would not yield productive computer-searching by terms or names has not been rekeyed for searchability. In such cases, as elsewhere in the collection, however, the text of the annotations accompanying the bibliographic records is word-searchable. Thus, in all cases, whether or not a given item is itself machine-searchable, the annotation provided for that item contains machine-searchable terms that reflect the item's content. The goal is to enable users to assess the material's relevance for particular lines of research in advance of immersion in the documents, and to make it easier to decide whether and when to call up non-machine-searchable documents.
Readers can expect the bibliographic records to tell them whether the particular item is electronically available in the form of facsimile page images only, or in the form both of word-searchable text and facsimile page images. Items offered in word-searchable form have been rekeyed to within 99.95 percent accuracy.
The item-level annotations that enhance the Coolidge-Consumerism Collection go well beyond customary Library of Congress descriptions of content in bibliographic records. Pedagogical usefulness is a key feature of the way in which materials are presented in this electronic collection. In addition, educators will be able to review materials, print them out, and pull them up on computer screens in classrooms around the country. An educator will be able to select and mark materials for use by students in the school or college library.