Seduction of the Innocent

How UMBC’s Special Collections found a new audience by opening up its little grey boxes

Steve Ammidown, University of Maryland, College ParkPCA/ACA National Conference, March 28, 2013

The UMBC Comics Collection

• 6,000+ comic books and graphic novels

• Books about comic book art and culture

• Original art

Why Comic Books?

• UMBC founded in 1966• Collecting the uncollected• Science fiction

• Pulp magazines• Novels• Fanzines

• With the science fiction came the comic books!

The Secret Lair

Project One: Re-Cataloguing

• Originally catalogued as individual books

Action Comics #415

Action Comics #416

Action Comics #417

• Re-catalogued using ANSI/NISO Z39.71 2006 (R2011) standards

They Don’t Want to Be Catalogued!

• Wrong volume number• No volume number• Wrong issue number• No issue number• Nonsensical issue

number• Torn out splash page• No cover• Change of publisher

• Title change• Issue number reset• Volume number reset• Variant covers• Free hand-out issues• Magazine vs. comic

book• Spinoffs• “Giant-Size”

collections

There Are a LOT of Comic Books…

• Seeing the collection as a whole• Adult view of children’s culture• Cover art, advertising, social themes

Putting on a Show

• Teasing out a theme• The Comics Code

• Doing the research• Dr. Wertham• Senate hearings• Modern

reinterpretation

The Collection Revealed

The Collection Revealed

What Did We Accomplish?

• Increased profile among students AND faculty

• More exhibit visitors than in recent memory

• Increased traffic for the Comic Book Collection

Shared Authority

• Michael Frisch: “the interpretive and meaning-making process is in fact shared by definition- it is inherent in the dialogic nature of an interview, and in how audiences receive and respond to exhibitions and public interchanges in general” (2011,127)

Shared Authority in this Context

• Special Collections as a “kitchen” where meaning is made

• Blending institutional knowledge with subject knowledge

• Drawing attention to underused collections

Takeaways

• Archives and special collections cannot afford to be static

• We have the tools to make meaning of our own collections

• If someone is passionate about a collection, there’s an audience they can help you reach

Thank You!

Steve Ammidownsammidown@gma

il.comtwitter: @stegan

Recommended Sources

• Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Reinhart & Company, Inc, 1954.

• Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

• Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

• Adair, B., Filene, B., & Koloski, L. Letting go?: Sharing historical authority in a user-generated world. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011.

• Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. www.cbldf.org• Comics Vine. www.comicvine.com