The bulk of this collection is comprised of the Brookings County Sentinel, the Brookings Daily Press, the Brookings County Press and the Brookings Register mostly in their entirety from the 1880s to 2003. The newspapers are arranged by date and issue. Dates for each paper vary, with most beginning in the 1880s. The Miscellaneous newspapers series is composed of many issues of the South Dakota State Collegian in this collection, as well as many Anniversary papers from around the eastern side of South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota.

This collection consists mainly of Brookings Telephone Directories. Also included are:

• Farm directories
• Campus directories for South Dakota State University
• City directories published by Johnson's and the Directory Service Company
• Northeast Lake Regional telephone directories
• Deuel Telephone Regional Directory
• Brookings Lake Regional Telephone Directories
• Official Telephone Directory of Interstate Telecommunications Cooperative, Inc.
• East Central Dakota Directory
• Yellow Book (McLeod USA) for Sioux Falls/Brookings/ Vermillion/Yankton.

The Compiled Data series is composed of data compiled by George and Evelyn Norby and recorded into various databases. Material in this collection consists of data about the city of Brookings with a small amount covering Brookings County and South Dakota.