Collections

The world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of play-related artifacts

Strong National Museum of Play^® is home to more than 500,000 historical objects having to do with play. Thousands can be seen throughout the museum, and many more can be viewed in the museum’s online database, which draws on the museum’s catalog records. These artifacts inspire and support our institutional purpose and mission. We study play in order to encourage learning, creativity, and discovery and illuminate American cultural history.

Evolved from the personal collections of Margaret Woodbury Strong

Margaret Woodbury Strong founded the museum in 1968, and current holdings reflect her innate sense of fun, her fascination with the commonplace objects of daily life, and her love of play. More than 200,000 artifacts have been added since she died in 1969. In fact, the museum’s collection has grown exponentially over the past few years and, among other things, now includes:

• The world's largest and most comprehensive collection of toys and dolls
• The largest diversified grouping of American board games in a public institution in the United States
• One of the country’s largest and most diverse collections of electronic-games and electronic-game-related artifacts

Nationally significant archives for scholars, collectors, and others

The museum’s 100,000-volume research library and archives offers a unique and extensive collection of books, periodicals, trade catalogs, and archival records documenting the history of play. Pre-eminent among these are:

• The Stephen and Diane Olin Collection of more than 12,000 toy catalogs—the largest assemblage of historic toy catalogs anywhere
• The personal library and papers of Brian Sutton-Smith, America’s most celebrated play scholar
• The personal papers and other materials of game designer Sid Sackson
• An extensive collection of game- and puzzle-related books, periodicals, rules, instruction sheets, and catalogs donated by the internationally prominent Association of Game and Puzzle Collectors

Researchers, students, collectors, and scholars are welcome to use these unique archival resources and the museum’s extensive collection of play-related publications.

Library and Archives hours:
Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 to 4:30 p.m.
Appointments are encouraged.
Please call 585-410-6349 or e-mail library@museumofplay.org.

Make a donation to the collection

If you have an object, collection, publications, or documents that you would like the museum to consider as a potential donation, please call 585-410-6320 or e-mail collections@museumofplay.org. Please do not bring proposed donations to the museum without an appointment.

A wealth of images suitable for publication

Strong National Museum of Play supplies images of artifacts for use in publications, exhibits, and online resources. If you’re interested in finding out more about this for-fee service, please call 585-410-6320 or e-mail collections@museumofplay.org.

Go behind the scenes with our curators by reading the Play Stuff blog.