Abstract
The University of Miami Libraries Special Collections is home to the Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. In operation from 1927 until 1991, Pan Am was an iconic and groundbreaking airline beloved by travelers worldwide, pioneering the development of international air routes, commercial passenger service, and aviation technology. The collection is comprised of fifteen hundred boxes of administrative, legal, financial, technical and promotional materials, as well as internal publications, photographs, audiovisual material and graphic material.
Selected materials from the collection were digitized thanks to a 2016 grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission and a 2018 Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, which was made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This dataset contains 15 boxes of Press Releases from the Public Relations and Marketing Series of the Pan Am collection. The press releases were created by Pan Am from the 1940s through 1990 on a variety of topics, including routes, airplanes, fares, passenger service, operations, corporate finances and hires, and developments in aviation.
This dataset is available in the form of plain text files for use in textual analysis and digital scholarship research, inspired by the work of the Collections as Data project.
Each box of Press Releases is provided in the form of a zip file, which includes the text files, as well as a file roster and a readme file. Each text file represents one page from a folder in the original archival collection. The readme files include potential starting points, such as interesting keywords or queries customized for each box.
Full scans of the Press Releases and other digitized materials from the Pan Am Collection are available for viewing and download in the University of Miami Libraries Digital Collections.