The Contemporary Culture Collection (CCC) provides dramatically
different perspectives on contemporary issues and its holdings are often the
first (and sometimes the only) source of information on
the most sensitive issues. It is also a basic source for primary research
in social, political, economic, and cultural history as well as constituting
an autobiography of the vanguard organizations and individuals who produced
them.
CCC contains 4,000 journal, newsletter, and newspaper titles and 5,000 books and pamphlets. It was established in 1969 and has grown to include microfilm collections, audiotapes, posters and broadsides, ephemera holdings, and manuscript collections. Among its manuscript collections are the records of the Liberation News Service, the Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers, Youth Liberation, Seven Days, and the personal papers of poet Lyn Lifshin.
Publications and Research
The CCC hosted the Alternatives Acquisition Project from 1978-1980, which surveyed the acquisitions practices of selected college libraries, conducted seminars on selecting, processing, and providing reference service to alternative publications in Berkeley, Philadelphia, and Madison, Wisconsin, and produced a handbook offering the same information, Alternative Materials in Libraries (Scarecrow, 1982). A series of selective subject bibliographies citing alternative press publications, The Not in New York Times Bibliography Series, was compiled here. Alternatives in Print (Neal-Schuman, 6th ed., 1980-) was edited here. The holdings of the CCC served as a core collection for the selection of articles for Alternative Papers (Temple University Press, 1982).
A note on the illustration: Founded on the Temple Campus, the Temple Free Press and later Philadelphia Free Press took a radical stance on campus and later Philadelphia and national issues; 1968-1973.
Any questions? Please contact Thomas M. Whitehead