Educational, Civic, and Voluntary Organizations Artifacts associated with teaching, scouting, youth and fraternal groups, police service, and firefighting include two complete schoolrooms, teaching equipment, patent models, textbooks, clothing, and insignia. The more than 500 collections in the Archives Center include personal papers and business records documenting the history of American technology and cultural and social history enterprise. These materials support the artifact collections and scholarship. They occupy more than 9,000 shelf feet. Business advertising and related commercial visual ephemera include the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, proof sheets from the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, the Hills Bros. coffee company records, and large collections of greeting, postal, and sports cards.
Oral histories document major television advertising campaigns.
Music materials include the Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald collections and the Sam DeVincent collection of illustrated American sheet music. These collections, some of the largest in the museum, consist of approximately 200,000 objects. Though assembled mostly to document the technologies of resource use, they have become increasingly important in historical scholarship. This collection of firearms, swords, uniforms, and flags documents the history of the American military and is a rich source for the study of soldiers' lives. This collection focuses on machines and structures and includes extensive archival, model, and photographic collections.