The Norby Collection documents the history, development, and daily life of Brookings, South Dakota, and Brookings County, with limited coverage of South Dakota more broadly, from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty first century. Assembled by George and Evelyn Norby, the collection is organized into multiple series reflecting their sustained efforts to collect, compile, and preserve local historical documentation.

The collection includes extensive runs of the Brookings Register newspaper, providing long term coverage of local news, community events, politics, agriculture, business, and social life. Complementing the newspapers are compiled data files created by the Norbys that aggregate information drawn from newspapers and other local sources. These compiled records document city and county officials, elections, businesses, streets and addresses, homes and housing, churches, public services, cemeteries, schools, South Dakota State University buildings, and other aspects of municipal and community history.

Topical subject files form a substantial portion of the collection and include materials related to Brookings city and county government, organizations, churches, businesses, historic districts, education, South Dakota State University, named individuals, military service, railroads, public safety, cemeteries, and statewide topics. These files consist of clippings, publications, ephemera, maps, directories, reports, and reference materials and reflect both official activity and community life. Researchers are advised to consult both city and county subject groupings, as related material may appear in either.

The collection also includes a large body of directories, primarily telephone directories serving Brookings and surrounding rural areas, along with city directories, farm directories, regional directories, and campus directories for South Dakota State University. These directories document residents, businesses, institutions, and service areas over time. Ephemera within the collection includes business cards, envelopes, signs, calendars, bumper stickers, postcards, ribbons and badges, matchbooks, tokens, framed images, and other transient printed materials associated with local commerce, events, and organizations.

Materials related to the Norbys themselves document the acquisition, housing, processing, and public presentation of the collection, including South Dakota State University Archives records, Images of the Past program materials, and limited personal correspondence, photographs, and household items. Together, the series span approximately 1871 to 2006, with some undated material, and are arranged by series and subject to reflect the structure of the Norbys’ collecting activities.

The Photograph collection is composed of images of Brookings, South Dakota. There is also a considerable amount of images related to towns in Brookings County, South Dakota; Sinai, Elkton, White, Arlington, Bruce. Images of South Dakota State University, ranging in topic from Hobo days to images of campus, can also be found in the collection. Most of the images are negatives, 35mm and 4 x 5. There are also photographs ranging in size and several sheets of slides. These images are arranged numerically by identification number.

See staff for assistance in researching material in this collection.