Maps and Ephemera

The Institute maintains a small collection of maps related to North Dakota. The ephemera collection preserves documents important to our everyday existence. Many of these items are often overlooked in the collecting and preservation process since they are common, ordinary items printed for an occasion and then usually forgotten about or discarded soon after. Such commonplace items include tickets, programs, advertisements, announcements, calendars, documents, posters, labels, etc.

Collecting Areas

Maps Collecting is limited to basic maps of North Dakota without regard to time period, language, size or format of the material. In addition, collecting is done of city, railroad, highway, and other types of cartographic material.

Ephemera Additions to the ephemera collection usually come from manuscript collections as they are processed or donors who find individual items and offer them to the Institute. The collection is organized by broad topics, with a separate collection devoted to Fargo-Moorhead. Although no active collecting is done to search out ephemeral items, donations are welcome. Such offers are evaluated against current holdings since we attempt to develop a sampling of such materials and not collect exhaustively.