Ephemera

For other uses, see Ephemera (disambiguation).

A picture of an invitation to the Japanese embassy in Iceland

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Ephemera are transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day. Some collectible ephemera are advertising trade cards, airsickness bags, bookmarks, catalogues, greeting cards, letters, pamphlets, postcards, posters, prospectuses, stock certificates, tickets and zines. Decks of personality identification playing cards from the war in Iraq are a recent example.

Etymology

Ephemera (ἐφήμερα) is a noun, the plural neuter of ephemeron and ephemeros, Greek and New Latin for ἐπί - epi "on, for" and ἡμέρα - hemera "day" with the ancient sense extending to the mayfly and other short lived insects and flowers and for something which lasts a day or a short period of time.

Printed ephemera

In library and information science, the term ephemera also describes the class of published single-sheet or single page documents which are meant to be thrown away after one use. This classification excludes simple letters and photographs with no printing on them, which are considered manuscripts or typescripts. Large academic and national libraries and museums may collect, organize, and preserve ephemera as history. A particularly large and important example of such an archive is the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Over 2000 images from the John Johnson Collection are available to search online for free at VADS and more than 65,000 items are available online. Three hundred plus images of historic American ephemera predating 1960 are posted at www.ephemerastudies.org. This site adds 4 additional examples weekly.

Video and audio ephemera

By extension, Video Ephemera and Audio Ephemera refer to transitory audiovisual matter not intended to be retained or preserved. Surprisingly, the great bulk of video and audio expression has, until recently, been ephemeral. Early TV broadcasts were not preserved (indeed, the technology to preserve them postdates the invention of television). Even if radio and television stations preserve archives of their broadcasts, those backcatalogs are inaccessible in practice to the general public, leaving it to a small number of underground tape traders to exchange the rare, lucky moments when something unexpected or historical came across the air.

An article on the Ephemera Society of America website notes

Printed ephemera gave way to audio and video ephemera in the twentieth century. ... These present even more of a preservation problem than printed materials. Although seldom made available for libraries, when videotapes are acquired for archival preservation they are found to be made on low quality tape, poorly processed, and damaged from abuse by users.

The large capacity and reach provided by resources such as the Internet Archive and YouTube have made finding and sharing video ephemera (past and present) dramatically easier.

See also

• Found Footage Festival
• Prelinger Archives
• The Show with No Name

References

• The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian by Maurice Rickards et alia. London: The British Library; New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Fragments of the Everyday: A Book of Australian Ephemera by Richard Stone (2005, ISBN 0-642-27601-3)

External links

• National Library of Australia: National Library of Australia's Ephemera homepage; catalogue records for general printed ephemera in the National Library of Australia.
• Ephemera Society of America
• Overview of the archives of the Ephemera Society of America
• Eanian Collection of Ephemera at the British Library - Collection of 5,000 items relating to Victorian entertainment, especially conjuring, in the UK including posters, catalogues, trade cards etc.
• Ephemera in the State Library of Victoria, Australia - Collection includes political ephemera, theatre programmes, billboards and band flyers, and other ephemeral advertising materials
• Western Australian Ephemera in the State Library of Western Australia
• Hugh D. Auchincloss Middle East Book Collection at Pell Center of International Relations and Public Policy at the McKillop Library at Salve Regina University [1]
• The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images - A popular collection of printed ephemera of visual culture from 1820-1920.
• New Zealand Ephemera Society website - A New Zealand society for those interested in ephemera.
• Collection of ephemera of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
• ephemerastudies.org at Louisiana Tech University
• Sheaff, Dick. "Sheaff: Ephemera". Ephemera. http://www.sheaff-ephemera.com/. Retrieved 12 December 2011.