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Spanish Language & Hispanic Studies: Music, movies, and comics - oh my!

A resource guide for faculty and students in the Spanish Section of the Department of World Languages & Cultures at BGSU.

Browne Popular Culture Library

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use.

Collection strengths

Popular Fiction

Popular fiction predominates our collection, particularly novels in the romancemystery-detectivescience fiction-fantasy, and western genres. The Library also contains extensive collections of late 19th- and 20th-century juvenile/young adult series fiction.

Popular Entertainment

The Browne Popular Culture Library houses thousands of primary works relating to all kinds of popular entertainment, with particular strengths in materials documenting mass media: television, motion pictures, and radio.

Graphic Arts

The Browne Popular Culture Library has numerous items representing graphic elements such as: one of the largest comic collection in the U.S., a large collection of graphic novels, tens of thousands of book covers, calendars, trading cards, posters, etc.

Materials of note:

  • Graphic novels
  • Vintage and Mass market genre fiction written in or translated to Spanish
  • Mexican Lobby Cards - small posters that marketed films that were either produced in Mexico and/or Puerto Rico or produced in the United States and released in Mexico or Puerto Rico

Music Library & Bill Schurk Sound Archives

With almost a million recordings, the Music Library & Bill Schurk Sound Archives (MLBSSA) is the largest collection of popular music in an academic library in North America. Our recordings include 45s, 78s, 33s, LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes and CDs. The sound recording collection is supported by books, scores, video/film, hard-to-find periodicals, fanzines, promotional material and archival collections.

The MLBSSA also collects materials in support of BGSU's College of Musical Arts, including scores and recordings for study and performance, anthologies and collected works of individual composers. The Music Library is the repository for works performed at the New Music Festival, held annually by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music.

Materials of Note:

  • album covers
  • spanish-language sound recordings
  • sheet music (possibly)

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Curriculum Resources Center

The Curriculum Resource Center offers a significant collection of juvenile literature that could be useful for your media assignment.  Here's some more information.

Juvenile Literature

The juvenile literature collection consists of fiction and non-fiction written for children and young adults. Areas of strength include award winning fiction and nonfiction, poetry, fairy tales and folklore, graphic novels and biographies. The collection is divided into three distinct areas:

Fiction

Picture books, middle grades and young adult titles are intermixed and arranged by call number but are generally arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name.

Nonfiction

Arranged by the Dewey Classification System.

Biographies

All biographies, autobiographies and collections of biographies are pulled out of the nonfiction section are arranged all together along the wall of the CRC staff offices.

There are approximately 30,000 titles in this part of the collection.

Materials of note:

  • Children's literature either written in Spanish, written in English and Spanish, or translated to Spanish
  • Biographies of notable cultural figures
  • Young adult literature