I chose to examine The Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera collection from 1938-198x. I chose this because it seemed like the most enjoyable website to comb through while gaining a better understanding of the publicity materials used by the Walt Disney Company in its early years and through its massive expansion as a leader in the entertainment industry. This collection of publicity ephemera is an archived resource provided by the UCLA Special Collections Library that indexes the company various projects alphabetically. This collection of ephemera consists on photographs, press materials, such as press kits and books, stills, and other unique printed publications related to the film projects during this time. Based on this website, the historical narrative that is presented is one that is purely based on physical documents that are kept at an off-site location. Unfortunately, this site does not allow for any deeper understanding of the collection as it does not provide images or even descriptions of the content listed.
Due to the list of contents arranged alphabetically, the dates of each of the projects jumps around and it is hard to place which project may have been associated with which film. The descriptions are vague such as “Peter Pan – press kit material and still 1952”. Without images or descriptions of the images, it is hard to understand the full narrative of the collection. As Disney deals in visual representation primarily through animation, an imageless website does the collection a severe injustice. It would provide the viewer of the site more entertainment to see documents pertaining to this material in order to understand the marketing initiatives of the company, the changing visual representations of characters. This type of content does more than simply make a website more enjoyable to look at and explore, it provide the viewer with vital information.
Seeing art and materials is more than just ars gratia artis for the viewer. It provides a vital narrative of the historical time period and objectives of the company itself. It would be interesting to see if changes in press kit and character designed changed and how it did so through the time period of 50 years. Perhaps if the documents listed on the website were categorized by date, substance (press kits, photographs etc.), or project the overall data would be more easily read and therefore better understood. It would be very difficult to conduct thorough research based on this website alone.