Collectors, get ready to drop a pin:

The world’s oldest, largest Olympic memorabilia club — and modern bane of autocorrect — is bringing its annual collector’s fest to Olympic City this weekend, for a three-day show that’s part museum, part swap meet.

The Olympin (Olympic + pin, get it?) movement began quietly in the Albany, N.Y., area after the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. By the time the Los Angeles games rolled around, it was a nonprofit organization with a growing fanbase and presence at the games and beyond, said club board member Jim Goddard, who lives in Littleton.

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“Many of us got our start in 1984 in Los Angeles. That’s when it really took off,” said Goddard, chair of the organizing committee for the three-day Olympin Collectors’ Club Festival and Memorabilia Show, which kicks off Friday morning at the City Auditorium in Colorado Springs.

The trading of commemorative lapel pins actually began on a smaller scale within the Olympic community, Goddard said. Before the era of bar codes and laminated lanyard credentials, lapel pins were the go-to identifiers, and trading was a tradition in the Olympic Village.

“Everyone was issued a particular pin to identify what their role was at the Olympics — competitor, judge, International Olympics Committee member, press,” Goddard said.

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The hobby continued to proliferate over the years as more sponsors and different groups, including The Gazette, began making their own keepsake lapel pins to celebrate the games, as well as specific holidays and historic events that fell within their scope.

“Some are more rare than others, maybe because they are from countries that have smaller teams,” said Goddard, a fan of pins issued by media companies and national teams. “Seems like every year someone turns up with a pin from, say, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or from a country no one knew even had a team. They’re out there, and people keep searching for them.”

This weekend’s event, which is free to attend, will have more than 30 tables of collectibles, mostly pins but “everything from badges, medals, tickets, apparel, torches, all different things that came from Olympic games,” Goddard said.

It’s a memorabilia museum, with a twist.

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“Mostly it’s the members of our club who are buying, selling, trading, but for the general public … if they happen to have Olympic memorabilia, they can bring it and do the same,” he said. “Not everyone can be an Olympian, but anyone can trade Olympic pins. This is a chance for them to come out and be educated about it and start to participate in the pin tradition.”

Plus, he added, everyone who comes to the festival gets a free Olympic pin.

A selection of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee national governing bodies also will sell branded merchandise. And on Saturday and Sunday, multiple medal-winner Greg Louganis, considered the greatest diver in American history, will be on hand with his collection of pins and other items.

Louganis will be signing autographs and talking about his collected Olympic, and Olympin, relics, 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m. to noon Sunday.

“He will be talking to anyone who would like to come and see him,” he said, “at a table with his pins, just like the rest of us.”

Well, maybe not just like.