Among the many treasures at the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, you can find over 2,000 baseball cards in the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection. These early cards date from 1887 to 1914 and show Hall of Famers, such as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, Connie Mack, Walter Johnson, King Kelly, and Christy Mathewson.
Even with fan favorites like baseball cards, new technology and platforms can help a collection connect with new audiences. When the Library of Congress adopted the Story Map feature within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based software platform created by Esri, baseball cards were a natural fit for this immersive platform. Story maps are a combination of an online exhibition or presentation with opportunities for data analysis and visualization.
Pairing the metadata and high resolution images with an interactive map meant a new researcher experience was now up to bat. The “Off the Bench” story map launched in 2020.
In the “Off the Bench” Story Map, you can connect historical baseball cards to the teams’ hometowns in a way that expands access beyond specific players, games, and statistics. This data visualization technique affirms the broad cultural impact of baseball through the United States (and into Canada).
Development of the “Off the Bench” Story Map began with the visual map itself. Combing through the 2,100 records, we determined what data points were needed. First, we downloaded the metadata file and created a CSV file with appropriate headings for the Esri platform; team name, city/state, and specific catalog search URLs. The platform then pinned areas using a heat map filter to show concentration of cities with multiple teams and teams with several player cards. With this geographic map, baseball fans and the general public alike can more easily recognize the breadth and concentration of baseball cards at the turn of the century.
People enjoy looking for where they live today and seeing how baseball was active (or dormant) in their community or state. Using embedded links in the map allows visitors to jump right into the Library’s catalog. The links take viewers to canned searches within the Library catalog and provide ready access to descriptive information and high resolution image files.
After completing the map, we needed to determine a narrative for the long-form story experience. What new stories could we share? What would keep someone scrolling through the pages?
The fascination with collecting card sets and the different types of cards in the collection is the first narrative in “Off the Bench.” Baseball cards were first issued during the 1880s when tobacco companies used them to promote sales. While they were used sometimes to stiffen soft cigarette packages, advertising was their primary function. The baseball cards portray baseball players in formal poses as well as action scenes in either black-and-white photographs or color prints. The advertising components are often seen on the back of the baseball card itself, which is one of the reasons we created the high resolution scans of the card backs as well as the fronts.
The “Rookie and Veteran” and “Player then Manager” stories highlight narrative threads you can find within the collection when looking at a macro-level. A benefit of Story Maps is that countless stories can be visualized from the underlying map and dataset, so we did leave some topics such as statistic-based achievements and familial ties (so many brothers in the collection!) on the editing floor.
Despite the name Story Map, visual materials appear throughout the presentations, as pictures are critical in telling the stories. The Library of Congress continues to use the Story Maps platform to bring collections to audiences around the world. More than 75 stories are available online. What’s next? The entire Benjamin K. Edwards Collection has more than 15,000 cards. For researchers interested in advertising and cultural history as well as trade card collectors, the Prints & Photographs Division is hard at work creating an EAD finding aid for the rest of the collection.
Hanna Soltys, Reference Librarian, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
Comments