Hello everyone! For many, many years now I’ve put in a lot of hours scanning in a range of old Disney documents and ephemera for use in my research. I’ve also spent way too much time scouring eBay for such things, and watching as they become more and more scarce and, frustratingly, more and more expensive. I would imagine that it’s harder now than ever for an aspiring researcher to get started, as such documents are hoarded by a select few, and public archives are – sadly – pilfered.
Hoping to not become part of the problem myself, I’ve long tried to figure out a way to best share my hoard of documentation with interested parties. Recently, Foxxy at Passport to Dreams began a project exactly along the lines of what I’d been thinking, and that’s finally spurred me to actually do something. And so I’m happy to announce the Progress City Public Library, featuring the Progress City Disneyana Collection. Thanks to the auspices of the Internet Archive, I’m going to be slowly uploading documents and ephemera that I’ve collected and digitized over the last 20 years or so. I hope some of you enjoy such things, and that some of you can even make use of them in your own research!
Today we published our 250th document to the Library, a special item for those interested in the never-built Disney’s America project – it’s Design and Development Guidelines for the theme park which we obtained from a library in Virginia.
Of course this project has entailed a lot of effort and expense, so we’re very grateful to our Patreon supporters who help offset some of the cost of this documentation project. It’s very much appreciated! As a thank you to supporters, we’ve been making the scanned documents available to Patreon backers well in advance of their public posting as a bulk download, to save them the time of having to download things individually.
One thing that you can do to help out is to donate items to the collection! If you worked for Disney or know someone who did, and if you have access to old newsletters, documents, ephemera, magazines, and the like, we’d love to be able to scan them in and share them! Just drop us a line and we’d be happy to work something out to help preserve this knowledge for the future.
We hope you enjoy the collection and that you find something interesting in the stacks of the Progress City Public Library!
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