Elisa Shoenberger

The mission at the D.C. punk and indie fanzine collection at the University of Maryland–College Park’s Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library is to collect, preserve, and share self-published materials about the punk and indie music scene in the Washington, DC area from the 1970s through the present day.

The mission of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University is to collect, preserve, and encourage the study of comics. It’s considered one of the largest collections of comics and cartoon materials in the world.

The Joffrey Ballet was many people’s first introduction to the world of ballet and dance. After the company was founded in New York City by Robert Joffrey (1930–88) and Gerald Arpino (1923–2008) in 1956, it grew and performed in big cities and small towns across the United States and the world. Its archives are now housed in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Jerome Robbins Dance Division, which mounted an exhibition, “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.,” in 2024–25. The exhibition is currently open at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, an exhibition space, from October 3 through December 20.

The mission of the Washington University in St. Louis Film & Media Archive is to preserve documentary film and media about the United States’ political and social movements, focusing on the Civil Rights movement and African American history.

It’s not every day that Kermit the Frog attends the opening of a new cultural institution. But on September 23, 1978, Kermit helped cut the ribbon on the newly opened Center for Puppetry Arts (also known as the Center) in Atlanta, which celebrates all things puppetry—string puppets, sock puppets, shadow puppets, stick puppets, and more—with permanent and pop-up shows in the museum, live puppet performances on-site, and educational workshops, as well as through the archives and books at the Nancy Staub Research Library.

The mission of the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA) is to gather the papers and ephemera of 19th- and 20th-century Black female activists and intellectuals. The digital and community-centered archive includes the papers of four extraordinary women—Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—from archives and repositories across the United States and Canada.

The mission of the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) in Sacramento, CA, is to collect, preserve, and share the deep history of railroads and railroading in California and the rest of the western United States. The organization is also home to a large 19th-century reconstruction of a railroad station and railroad depot, with a still-functional train that gives tours to patrons.

Established in 2013 in Corvallis, OR, the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive at Oregon State University aims to collect and preserve books, periodicals, ephemera, and artifacts about brewing and hops farming in the Pacific Northwest. The university has a department dedicated to food science and technology under its College of Agricultural Sciences, as well as its own Research Brewery, and since 1995 has offered one of the few Fermentation Science programs in the country. But it would take a department merger and a wedding to spark the creation of the archive.

Chartered by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC, holds the distinction of being the only bilingual university for Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and other Deaf Disabled students in the world. Consequently, it has the world’s largest archives of materials related to deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, with a mission to preserve “the institutional memory of the University and historic material from the global Deaf community,” according to the Gallaudet website.