Special Collections
The Gordon B. Olson Library’s Special Collections comprises materials about North Dakota, its localities, Minot State University, and Indigenous peoples of the region. The collection is intended to bring together materials about the history, culture, science, and people of the state.
The following guidelines are used when selecting materials for Special Collections:
- A significant portion of the content of the material must concern North Dakota.
- Publications of Minot State University including theses, catalogs, materials of administrative nature, and yearbooks are collected.
- Local histories of North Dakota cities, towns, and counties are housed in Special Collections but the library will not attempt to locate and purchase every local history that is published. Emphasis will be placed on materials about north-central and northwestern North Dakota.
- Native Americans of the Northern Plains included in Special Collections include the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Sioux, Sisseton, Wahpeton and Plains Ojibway peoples.
- One copy of all North Dakota Geological Survey publications is included in Special Collections.
- Generally, North Dakota state documents will not be included in Special Collections but are housed in the government documents areas of the Library. Exceptions are made if they meet the content guidelines mentioned above and they are important and substantial publications of lasting value.
- The latest edition of reference materials about North Dakota are placed in the Reference Collection, with earlier editions located in Special Collections.
- North Dakota journals are located in the periodicals collection, including The Red and Green. North Dakota journals that cease publication and are no longer of use in active research, are bound, cataloged, and placed in Special Collections.
- All non-print materials about North Dakota are housed in the collection appropriate to its format. The exception is non-print materials about Minot State University.
- Maps, other than those issued by the North Dakota Geological Survey, are not housed in Special Collections.
- Materials by North Dakota authors that do not generally fit the Special content criteria are not placed in Special Collections.
Digital Special Collections
As we believe that it is important to preserve some of the rarest material that the Collection houses and provide digital access to the university community and beyond, the library undertook a project to digitize selected items from its special collections.
All materials were scanned using either an HP Scanjet or a Microtek Scanmaker III scanner hardware. The documents were scanned into TIFF files. After manual editing of the document image, the TIFF files are converted to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. In order to keep the PDF files reasonably sized, the documents were divided into smaller PDF files following the logical format of the document.
