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Personal Collections

Each personal collection included in the archive is more than just a group of individual items, not only are they a part of a larger whole but they provide a picture of what each person decided to saved from the past.   Gathering these collections involved not only what people had saved, but where people thought things were stored and how easy the items were to gather.  In the end the items that were handed over to be scanned or converted were unique to each person and constitute a stockpile of ephemera that helped to create not only a more complete picture of St. Louis punk but also of that person’s place in the wider scene.  When asked what they saved from their years in the scene, each person naturally came up with a different set of objects.  Some people saved a little and some people a lot.  In some cases members of a band had saved little from their own musical efforts but had kept long lost pieces of the histories of other bands.  In each case the items represent not a complete picture of what they bought or collected in their youth but instead what they were able to rescue from a time in their lives when nearly everything was transitory.