The Strong National Museum of Play has the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of playthings. That’s amazing. It’s also daunting! Researchers, whether they’re coming here on site or searching through our digital holdings, often struggle to locate the materials that would be most useful for their research projects. Some of that is inherent in the vast size of the collection, but some of it reflects the fact that objects of diverse types are cataloged using a number of different systems, each appropriate to the unique class of objects being preserved. Three-dimensional artifacts such as dolls and toys, after all, present different cataloging challenges than archival materials, which in turn differ from physical written publications or digital files.
The result is that there are different databases storing and organizing these items, and there’s no one-stop shop to find everything in The Strong’s collections. It can all be bewildering for the poor researcher just trying to find the appropriate materials! So, I thought it would be useful to put together a quick primer on where to find things at the museum.
The core of the museum’s collection are hundreds of thousands of physical, three-dimensional objects like dolls, toys, board games, physical copies of video games, jigsaw puzzles, and other materials related to play. Museum staff members catalog every object individually, assign it a unique ID number, and then enter it into the museum’s internal database system called Argus. There are many fields of information for each item—what’s often called metadata—that denote things ranging from where the item was made to how the museum acquired it. Many of these objects and their associated information—but not all—are available for search through the collections search page on the website. This is the best place to start when searching for manufactured items, say a doll, toy, or game.
Yet the museum is interested not only in playthings, but also in documenting what has been said about them and how they were made. Here the museum’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play is especially important. This part of the museum is divided into two parts, as the name implies. The library houses primarily published materials, whether those are books, magazines, trade catalogs, or other materials (usually printed, but sometimes multimedia) and those items can be located here.
By contrast the museum’s archives usually hold unpublished materials that document how playthings were designed, made, sold, or enjoyed, things like design documents, concept art, business records, correspondence, and focus group tests. Unlike with the collections or library catalogs, items are not individually cataloged but instead organized into specific sets of “papers,” each of which has a dedicated finding aid that allows researchers to home in on where to find relevant materials. These include both traditional physical copies of documents but also digital materials. The archives database provides access to these records, but researchers should be aware that the finding aids only describe general overview of the materials, organized in boxes and folders. They do not enumerate every specific memo or drawing. There’s no substitute for going through each folder and, following the advice of the great biographer Robert Caro, “turn every page.”
The museum has also begun to make some of these materials available on the internet by scanning and uploading files. While these are sometimes findable at a macro level in other databases, the museum maintains a special section devoted to preserving digital materials and making them available on the web. That Preservica site, which holds items ranging from oral histories to scans of the diary of game designer George Parker, is available here. This is a great place to get direct access to primary sources.
Lastly, it sometimes pays to use the general search function on the museum website. This will often reveal more information, primarily through blogs composed by museum staff or outside researchers who have written about things they’ve discovered in the museum’s holdings. This can often provide important context for specific holdings and sometimes point out things that might not be easily identified any other way.
Those are the general ways that researchers can find relevant holdings in the museum, but it might be useful to show how this would work on a practical level with a specific example. So, let’s imagine there is a researcher who is interested in studying the hit toy-to-life Skylanders series, that debuted in 2011, and wants to explore the collections, many of which arrived at The Strong as a major donation from the game’s developer Toys for Bob. How would that researcher use these various databases?
First, to get a sense of the scope of The Strong’s collection in this subject, it would be useful to search the artifact catalog, and that would reveal that the museum has (at the time I was writing this, in early 2024), 443 objects that contain the keyword “Skylanders.” There may be others that a simple search misses, perhaps because of a typo in the cataloging record or some other factor, but there’s a good chance this covers the vast majority of the collection.
Looking in the museum’s library catalog shows that the museum also holds secondary source literature that mentions the game, guides to specific titles such as Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures, and even some fiction set in the Skylanders universe, such as the children’s book Skylanders: The Trap Masters.
Exploring the archives catalog leads to other discoveries, including the fact that in the Toys for Bob Collection there are numerous records related to the games’ development, including concept sketches and production flow charts. Among the items listed in the collection are video oral histories that we conducted with Toys for Bob executives, designers, programmers, and artists when picking up the materials, and these are available for viewing in the Preservica collection. Finally, a quick search of the museum’s website uncovers two blogs related to Skylanders, one that describes how the museum obtained the Toys for Bob collection and the other that describes the collection donated by the company’s cofounder, Paul Reiche III. Both of these point out specific items and provide further context for the collection that might be of interest to researchers.
There used to be a popular saying that supposedly harkened back to the American gold rush (though I remember it more from Looney Tunes cartoons), “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Of course, knowing there was gold under the ground didn’t mean that it was easy to find. It took some digging. The same is true of The Strong’s collection. There’s historical gold in them there archives, and it’s a lot easier to find once you know where to look.