Reflections on Cataloging the Library of Personal Finance from the Institute for Financial Literacy

Imagine going to the lobby of a bank, the business section of a public library, or any location where one may find free promotional literature about financial products. One may find leaflets about the responsible use of credit and debit cards, advice on creating personal budgets, or brochures on financial services for retirees. These pamphlets are made for those looking for helpful resources and information about their financial well-being. At Hagley, the Library of Personal Finance from the Institute for Financial Literacy collection provides a robust sample of these types of pamphlets along with books, press kits, and various educational manipulatives.

There are Spanish versions of some pamphlets, as well as a selection of bilingual Spanish/English pamphlets. The extraordinary breadth of subjects and materials within this collection furnishes researchers with numerous examples of various kinds of consumer-directed financial products and provides valuable information on the health of the financial world in recent decades.

The Institute for Financial Literacy (IFL) is a non-profit organization based in Portland, Maine, whose Library of Personal Finance collection came to Hagley in 2016. While cataloging from home this past year, I worked through two boxes of the IFL collection, an ongoing project, and a small portion of the ninety-five boxes held within Published Collections. While the collection contains various forms of printed media, the couple of boxes I worked through consisted primarily of pamphlets. The sheer abundance of the single-paged promotional flyers I mentioned above was, initially, daunting as I had only recently started cataloging. Yet, working through the items and searching for possible matches on the search engine/catalog WorldCat, I found only very few exact matches. There were some similar records for a few items, but many of these items needed records to be created outright. As a result of this, Hagley is the only holder of many of these items for research purposes.

Scholars interested in studying a diverse range of subjects, such as personal spending and saving habits, trends in consumer investing, or the history of educating children on financial literacy, and more, are invited to look in the Hagley Library Catalog for the Library of Personal Finance from the Institute for Financial Literacy collection.