ABSTRACT
The Popular Culture Library was founded in 1969 as a specialized collection in the university library system of Bowling Green State University, one of the publicly funded universities in the Ohio state system of higher education. The collection was intended to support curricular needs in new areas of teaching in cultural studies, particularly in the fields of American culture and modern popular culture. As the years have passed, however, and interdisciplinary cultural research has gained more prominence in the academic world, our institutional objective has grown from the comparatively limited function of curricular support to the larger one of acquiring, preserving, and making accessible primary research materials documenting 19th and 20th century American popular culture to meet the needs of a growing, international community of scholars.
