USU cataloging the history of outdoor rec products

LOGAN — It seems fitting in an area with a university and great outdoors opportunities that there would be an archive of historical outdoor product magazines and periodicals.

And that is the case with Utah State University’s Outdoor Recreation Archive initiative with print materials focused on outdoor product history.

On KVNU’s For the People program on Tuesday, Chase Anderson, who does industry outreach and marketing for the USU Outdoor Product Design and Development program talked about the program.

“One of the things that I think we recognized was these catalogs that most of us have received, they show up in our mailbox.  Those are time capsules in a lot of ways. This junk mail that shows up that you could easily flip through and then toss later on, we’ve started gathering that. We realized – wow, there’s an opportunity to really go back in time and look at product trends, just histories of companies in general,” said Anderson.

It’s in conjunction with Clint Pumphrey, a manuscript curator with Special collections and archives at USU.

Anderson said that Pumphrey was approached by a faculty member who was teaching a course in the history of outdoor products, who proposed the idea of bringing together a collection of outdoor print materials.

And now Anderson said they have quite a collection.

We’ve got about 8,000 catalogs in the collection, catalogs and magazines, I should say, representing over 700 brands and publications. So, it’s publicly available, you can go up to Utah State and visit the collection and look through old catalogs if you’re interested.”

You can also see the collection on Instagram under the handle ‘Outdoor Rec Archive’.

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