Sarah Palin for Vice President: A Case Study of a Simple T-Shirt’s Historical and Social Context as Important Considerations for Creating Descriptive Metadata in Finding Aids

Abstract

With the influences of technology and material culture changing the teaching environment in universities, it is also doing so as Special Collections department continue to collect faculty material. Traditional manuscript and Archives collections are now seeing the addition of more artifacts as contemporary cultural production and its social representations are used for analysis in various curriculum. Creating finding aids for this material has to take into consideration the historical and contextual rhetoric surrounding the material and has to be a part of the thinking process when finding aids are being created.

Keywords:

• Finding aids
• Special Collections
• University curriculum
• exhibitions
• social context
• artifact
• t-shirt

Notes

1 Sarah Green, “Managing Textiles Collections,” in Conserving and Preserving Materials in Nonbook Formats, ed. Kathryn Luther Henderson and William T. Henderson (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1991), 113–126; Sean Quimby, “There’s a Great Future in Plastics: Mainstreaming a Special Collection,” Research Library Issues 284 (2013): 11–15.

2 J. Gordon Daines and C. Nimer, “Re-Imagining Archival Display: Creating User-Friendly Finding Aids,” Journal of Archival Organization 9, no. 1 (2011): 4–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/15332748.2011.574019.

3 M. Maynard, Dress and Globalisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 50.

4 Ibid., 64.

5 J. Gibson, Art and Advertising (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 7.

6 Gunnar Swanson, Graphic Design and Reading: Explorations of an Uneasy Relationship (New York: Allworth Press, 2000), 52.

7 J. Caputi, “Character Assassinations: Hate Messages in Election 2008 Commercial Paraphernalia," Denver University Law Review 86 (2009): 600.

8 Ibid. Caputi quoting Barry Blitt, “The Politics of Fear,” New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

9 M. Maynard, Dress and Globalisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 66–67.