What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City By Frank Felsenstein and James L. Connolly

Abstract

In 2003, librarians at the Muncie Public Library discovered a cache of ledgers documenting the names and addresses of every person who joined the library between 1875 and 1904, the books acquired by the library from 1875 to early 1903, and ten years of circulation transactions beginning in November 1891. Seeking to make these rare records available to the public, the library collaborated on a six-year project with the Ball State University Center for Middletown Studies and the Ball State Libraries to create an online database, What Middletown Read.