Ever notice that most sports announcers always seem to have current statistics? Now I understand the history of why they do. Sports fans and industry analysts have been tracking statistics for years as evidenced by the online Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889‐1939 (SBBG), a new member of the American Memory Collection produced by the Library of Congress. A delight to baseball aficionados, scholars, statisticians and other cultural historians, SBBG comprises a historic selection of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide and the Official Indoor Base Ball Guide. The guides were the brainchild of A.G. Spalding, a baseball player, manager, and executive turned sports manufacturer.
SBBG is a series of reproductions of guides originally published by the American Sports Publishing Company founded by Spalding. Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide's were “perhaps the premier baseball publication of its day” and include editorials on the game, statistics, photographs, and analyses of the previous season for all major league teams and many minor league teams. Official Indoor Base Ball Guide's reveal a game unfamiliar to contemporary sports fans, but whose rules are the foundation of softball. The guides include how‐to information, information on a game's history, rules, and advertising. There are 20 Official Indoor Base Ball Guide's in the collection. These guides were published from 1903‐1926 and vary in page length from 68 to 196 pages. There are 15 Spalding Official Base Ball Guide's in the collection. These guides were published from 1889‐1939 and vary in page length from 180 to 528 pages.
The search mechanisms are well developed and structured. Researchers are first presented with two options, a keyword search or a title browse. The title browse is the easiest way for a user to get familiar with the content and structure of a guide. In fact, a guide can be selected and viewed just as the original might – by turning each of the pages. Each item in the collection has bibliographic data that includes the following: creator, original publication data, call number, notes, repository, digital ID, and subject headings (in the case of this collection there are only two: Baseball–Periodicals and Indoor baseball‐Periodicals). Researchers seeking specific information on an individual player or a team enter search terms and utilize easy pull‐down menus. A search may be limited to information contained in the bibliographic record of an item or to the full text of records (word and exact phrase searching is possible). Search tips and an advanced precision search mechanism are available.
Full‐text searching is the most effective way to find specific pieces of information. A search for the phrase Babe Ruth using core bibliographic fields yielded zero results. The same search executed in the full‐text search yielded 21 exact matches and 46 other assorted combinations. A search on the phrase Kitten Ball, a variation of baseball designed for city life, yielded four exact matches and 96 other assorted match combinations. Researchers have the option of viewing matches by the page image, a text version, the bibliographic information, or the table of contents for the guide.
The staff members at Library of Congress did an excellent job describing how the collection came to life in the Building this Collection link. Black and white pages were scanned at 600‐dpi 8‐bit grayscale images, and the beautiful colour covers were scanned at 600‐dpi 24‐bit colour images. The browser‐display images for all document images are in the JPEG format, one reduced sized, one 500‐pixel‐wide, and another unrescaled version. Searchable text was prepared using proprietary Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. It is important to note that the OCR is uncorrected and encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Online presentation of the texts also includes a version in HTML as it is easier for most researchers to access.
Other helpful links are About the Collection, which provides in‐depth information on the scope and history of the guides; Related Resources includes links to other related American Memory Collections, as well as external links to relevant sites such as Major League Baseball. Copyright and Other Restrictions provides useful information and Acknowledgements mentions the many and skilled librarians at the Library of Congress who brought this project online.
SBBG represents just 35 of the more than 1,000 Spalding guides housed in the Library of Congress. The online presentation of these guides is easy to use and the quality of the work done in the digitization process is outstanding. SBBG is a wonderful addition to the American Memory Collection, a gateway to primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the US.
