Postcards in the Library
Yingdang Ren | 2023 | ISBN: 1682508587 | English | 254 pages | True PDF | 11 MB
Postcards, like photographs are an item familiar to everyone. Everyone, as a child or adult, has purchased a postcard as a souvenir, sent one to a friend or loved one, or received one. Today researchers, students, and teachers have a wealth of teaching materials available at their fingertips to use for projects or in the classroom. These sources include everything from photographs and letters to census records, maps, and newspapers. However, postcards are a source often disregarded. The picture postcard came to widespread use after 1902, with a change in rules that allowed both message and address on the same side of the card. This freed up the reverse of the card for an illustration. Suddenly postcards and postcard collecting became all the rage. By 1909 over 800 million postcards were being posted annually in Britain. More were bought just to be kept as souvenirs. The period from 1902-1919 became known as the "Golden Age of Postcards." Nearly every professional photographer working at this time was involved in producing postcards.
Postcards in the Library gives compelling reasons why libraries should take a far more active and serious interest in establishing and maintaining postcard collections and in encouraging the use of these collections. Postcards in the Library describes the postcard collections in a variety of libraries of different kinds and sizes and indicates very real ways in which the effective use of postcard collections can result in and contribute to substantive, scholarly publications. It also offers advice and suggestions on the myriad issues that libraries face in handling these ephemeral fragments of popular culture.
Postcards in the Library
