Library Dedication Ceremony Program (June 12, 1014)
The National Brewery Museum TM Research Library
By Rich Wagner
The opening reception for the ABA library celebrates the latest addition to the National Brewery Museum and Potosi Brewery Restaurant complex, giving people even one more reason to visit. Tacked on, almost as an afterthought during negotiations with the Potosi Foundation, Inc., the ABA Library has been a long held dream for the countless people whose efforts have made the project a success.
The ABA Library, a perfect adjunct to the National Brewery Museum, will provide public access to a professionally organized and administered collection of brewery and breweriana related materials. Everything from printed matter to digitized files, images, and video will be available to researchers.
The ABA has been at the forefront when it comes to providing services to its members, and a primary way has been to make historical information available in digital form on the ABA website. So far One Hundred Years of Brewing and several trade journals are available. In addition, American Breweries is now on the website as a dynamic document, which will encourage updates, changes and corrections to make it even more useful.
The internet has certainly made available an ever growing amount of information to those researching genealogy or brewing history, but what has been digitized, in most cases, has come from physical collections housed in libraries, historical societies, and museums. The ABA Library will be such a collection, serving as a repository for more primary source information or historical documents that people may wish to donate. And as more materials are added they can become part of the ABA Library’s digital collection and find their way to the web.
It is interesting to see how many breweriana collectors have been inspired to do research and write about the breweries they collect. The ABA Library is a dream come true for these and other researchers and will undoubtedly become the primary source for those researching the brewing industry, advertising, and technology, among the wide variety of topics the ABA Library has to offer.
It is difficult to imagine the National Brewery Museum, brewery- restaurant complex getting any better. After all, a brewery re-incarnated as a brewery with a museum tacked on is pretty hard to beat. But the addition of a library showcases the latest facet of the jewel that is the National Brewery Museum.