By Heidi Butler, Local History Specialist at the Capital Area District Libraries, Lansing, Michigan
In 2022, we completed a display case of material honoring one of our local small-business families who operated a bar in Lansing for many years. The family has made generous donations to the Local History department of the Capital Area District Libraries (Lansing, Michigan), including funds to purchase the display case.
In the display, we focus on the bar owners’ support of community recreation league sports of all kinds, especially baseball and softball, and tabletop shuffleboard. It is one of few local bars (now under new ownership) that maintains 22-foot tabletop shuffleboard tables. We were able to display several objects on loan from the family, as well as photographs and documents from the Local History collections, to help tell this story.
We have learned a few things through working with this family, which began with the acceptance of a scrapbook about the bar when the family sold it to new owners several years ago. We discovered that sometimes simple attention to a historical collection that means something to a family can be the foundation for mutual support of both the family and library’s interests. They were hoping to elevate the community’s awareness of their family impact on both the night life and recreational sports of the greater Lansing area over many decades, and we were looking for ways to expand and improve our ability to display Local History collections. They heard of our struggle with funding and offered to provide funds for a display case. We were required to go through a bid process, and through that we also learned about local manufacturers who could custom build a case to meet our needs.
Although the first few displays in the exhibit case the family funded are dedicated to family history and their local impact, going forward we have several ideas for themes and topics we would like to highlight. The family’s priorities are on the immigrant experience, sports, and small business (especially women-owned), but we are not limited to those topics.
Heidi Butler is the Local History Specialist at the Capital Area District Libraries. She received her MSLS from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2000, and became a Certified Archivist in 2005. She has worked in a variety of archival settings both domestically and abroad, and finds public library archives to be the best fit for her.
This post is the first in an ongoing series on “Public Library Archives Exhibits.” This series will feature the many different ways in which public library archives and special collections utilize their collections through physical and virtual exhibits for public outreach. Specifically, PLASC is interested in providing our membership with examples of other institutions’ exhibits that focus on underrepresented groups, overlooked history, archives and community joint-created exhibits, or feature innovative displays or designs. We are interested in exhibits that led to the development of new policies, new standards and workflows, or helped increase public interaction with your archives.
You can submit your blog post ideas by email with the subject heading “Exhibit Blog Post” to the PLASC email address publibarchives@gmail.com.
The Finding Aid 