About
CONTENT WARNING
This database and the collections it describes may include content and language that is upsetting or triggering. Images, titles, and descriptions reflect the language and attitudes of the historical period in which they were created and may be racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive or discriminatory. The Museum is actively updating outdated and derogatory language in our database. Every effort is being made to ensure offensive terminology is replaced with accurate language that individuals and communities use to describe themselves.
To preserve the historical context of the record, in certain instances problematic language will not be changed. Examples include:
- Titles of published works
- Creator supplied information
- Newspaper captions
- Marginalia
People & Institutions Biographies
All Hall of Famer biographies are pulled and updated directly from the Museum's main website. Biographical information for other players and other baseball personnel is pulled from Baseball-Reference. All other source information is documented within the biography. If no information about a particular person or institution is known, the biography has been left blank.
Subject Heading Naming Conventions:
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum adheres to professional naming conventions, using the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) as our foundation. If a player has no LCNAF, we follow the common name used on Baseball-Reference. If the authorized name used by either of these organizations is deemed culturally insensitive or problematic by the institution, a local naming convention is used instead.
Teams are listed by current name or, in the case of legacy teams, the name they were most commonly known by (when this information is known).
There are a few ways to browse the Online Collection:
On the homepage, you can browse curated selections from our collection.
On the exhibitions page, you can browse information about our exhibitions, and view artworks from each exhibition.
On the people page, you can browse individuals and/or institutions related to objects in the collection, along with relevant biographies and objects.
On the My Collections page, you can browse user-created collections. You can add your own favorites to Community My Collections by registering on the site and creating sets that are marked "public".
On the thesaurus page, you can browse structured vocabularies to find records with specific keywords. You can also see these terms when viewing a search result in detail. Click on these terms to browse other records linked to this term.
Enter keywords or names in the search box (Quick Search) to find objects or other records in our collection. To search on specific criteria, you can use the advanced search to search within certain data fields. You can search using multiple criteria, such as the term "portrait" in the title + a date range of "1800-1900". If you are not getting any results with advanced search, try broadening your search by removing criteria.
- You can use an * (asterisk) as a wildcard in searches, to match partial terms (e.g. draw* will return results for draw, drawn, drawings, etc.)
- Use quotation marks to get more exact results - e.g. John Doe will return any results with John or Doe, but "John Doe" will return results with this exact phrase.
There are different types of search results, such as object records and people records. When there is more than one type of result, you can choose different types of records to view.
You can refine a result set by using filters to narrow down results. For example, you can filter to see only works that have images within any result set. You can also clear each filter to revert to a larger result set, or clear all filters to get to your original result set.
An image may be shown as not available if it is not yet available in our database, or if it cannot be displayed for copyright reasons.
The Thesaurus page allows you to browse the online collection through linked keywords. Objects in the collection are linked to terms from The Getty Vocabularies and other authorities, which contain structured terminology for art and archival collections.
To select a thesaurus, click the dropdown for more options. In the thesaurus tree view, you can expand or collapse levels by clicking the triangle symbol. Clicking on any term in the tree will show a preview of objects in the collection which are associated with the term. To view all objects with this term as a search result, click the "View all" button in the right panel.
You can also click on terms in the detail view, which will jump to the associated branch in the thesaurus and show you other objects with this term.
My Collections allows you to create your own sets from the collection objects available on this site. You can share your My Collections with others, or create sets of artworks for your own viewing (My Collections are private by default).
You can optionally add a description for each My Collections set. You can view your collection sets by going to the "My Collections" page and logging into your account.
To use My Collections, you must first register an account. Once you have completed registration, you can start creating My Collections sets and adding artworks to them.
You can add artworks to your sets by clicking on the heart symbol while viewing objects, and selecting which set to add the artwork(s). After selection, you can choose to add all selected works on the page to a My Collection. You can also add the entire result set or all objects on a page.
If you mark your My Collections set public, this My Collection will be visible to others in the Community My Collections section. The option to mark a set as public is available when you edit your My Collection.
After setting a My Collection set as public, you can also share the link to allow others to view your set.