The collection also contains numerous autobiographies and dying confessions of convicted criminals, theater playbills, sheet almanacs, publishers' prospectuses, advertisements, newspaper carriers' addresses, patriotic and popular songs, ballads, and poems, broadsides illustrating political party organization and controversy. For the student of nineteenth-century social and cultural history, there is information on a wide variety of local and national organizations and societies that were established to promote industrial and mechanical arts, agriculture, science, public education, religion, the fine arts, and various reform movements. Isaiah Thomas was highly instrumental in preserving many of his own and other printers' most ephemeral pieces, and the Society actively collects broadsides printed before 1877. Between 1978 and 1985, AAS received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the creation of a bibliographical descriptive catalogue, in machine-readable format, of almost 8,000 of the Society's original broadsides and photostats that were printed in the United States from 1639 through 1830. As a result, AAS is able to provide full, scholarly access to its earlier broadsides through complex methods of indexing and information retrieval, both locally and at the national level through RLIN, the shared cataloguing network of the Research Libraries Group.
Access is also available through a chronologically arranged shelflist of the collection.
The broadsides issued after 1870 are not catalogued. Their arrangement and access is either by date of publication or, when appropriate, according to specific genre. The vast majority of broadsides pertaining to Worcester forms a separate collection that is arranged by subject.