Social Movements, Elections and Ephemera Collections

East View’s Social Movements, Elections, Ephemera series eliminates the need to acquire, catalog and shelve thousands of campaign materials that are fleeting by nature and challenging to obtain. Examples of typical materials available by country and type of election (presidential or parliamentary) include:

• Candidate biographies and financial disclosures
• Campaign statements, stickers and advertisements
• Complaints of fraud and election irregularities
• Election programs and political party charters
• Photographs from campaign events
• Political posters and brochures
• Precinct address lists and protocols
• Voter bulletins, handouts and leaflets

The collection of these materials is done in primarily two ways:

• East View researchers on the ground (sometimes in adverse political circumstances such as during the Euromaidan protests), systematically canvass prime locations (government offices, party headquarters, mass protests) to collect all physical materials—including handouts, posters, pamphlets, and special election issues of newspapers. Occasionally our staff may even photograph mass demonstrations or other important events to add important context to the materials collected.
• Back at headquarters, East View staff scours through the Internet looking for relevant websites, social media accounts, etc. downloading relevant material (statistical and financial data, official documents and pronouncements that are for various reasons available only online).

After the collection of all the relevant materials, our staff analyzes and classifies what is central for the collection from what is tangential and lacks intrinsic research value. All significant materials are then scanned, “OCRd,” and converted into an archivable PDF with searchable metadata created for every item, including the date of the creation of the item (where available), the date and the location of when and where said item was obtained by East View, a brief descriptor of the item, the type of the item (poster, brochure, booklet etc.), as well as its size and the amount of pages the item contains. After the collection is uploaded into East View’s Universal Database platform, it is indexed to make the database searchable by type and by source. Finally, each item is assigned a permanent URL for citation purposes.