The Strong National Museum of Play

The Strong National Museum of Play will improve the accessibility of its collections for researchers, scholars, and students by enhancing the documentation and preservation of its 30,000-volume collection of toy trade catalogs. The museum will rehouse and catalog a group of 5,000 rare and ephemeral toy trade catalogs from the toy, doll, puzzle, and game industries and will scan and digitize a selection of 2,500 high priority catalogs. Project activities will include uploading associated catalog records to World's Largest Library Catalog (WorldCat), placing catalogs in appropriate archival enclosures and storing them on powder-coated steel shelving units, and acquiring specialized scanning equipment and training staff and volunteers in digitization and metadata processes. The project will result in a rehoused, cataloged, and digitized toy trade catalog collection that will be a more fully accessible asset to document the history of play.