Capturing the Campaigns

Balloons and confetti, speeches and sound-bites, pundits and polls – all signal a U.S. election season in full flight. And the surest signs of the season are buttons and bumper stickers, postcards and posters, and, inevitably, emails and phone calls. This sometimes useful, often annoying, always ephemeral documentation provides fertile fodder for research by students and scholars of communications and media, history, law, political science, and many other disciplines.

 

Launched in the 1920s, the UCLA Library’s Campaign Literature Archive contains print election materials for federal, state, and local offices and ballot measures affecting Los Angeles. Since 1998 it captures campaign websites as well. In addition, earlier this year the Library created a web archive of the UK Brexit campaign websites – and just in time, too, as some of the parties had started to remove or alter their contents!

 

You can view more at digital.library.ucla.edu/campaign.