Abstract
The University of Miami Libraries Special Collections is home to the Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records. From Pan Am’s founding in 1927 through its closing in 1991, Pan Am was a pioneer in the development of aviation equipment, air routes, commercial passenger service, navigation techniques, and communication systems. 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. A cataloging effort supported by a grant awarded in 2012 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has allowed these materials to be organized thematically. A subsequent NHPRC grant awarded in 2016 later enabled the library to digitize the Printed Materials Series from this vast collection and make it available online.
This dataset comprises periodicals produced by Pan Am throughout its history, both for internal and external audiences, and with a wide variety of subject matter. We are making the dataset 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 periodical is provided in the form of a zip file, which includes the text files, as well as a file roster and a readme file. The readme files for the majority of the periodicals include potential starting points: interesting keywords or queries customized for each periodical. These readme files were produced by Lilianne Lugo Herrera and Alexandria Morgan, the UM Libraries Digital Humanities UGrow Fellows for 2018-19, working with Digital Scholarship Librarian Paige Morgan.
While this dataset only includes the plain text, full scans of the periodicals and other materials from the Pan Am Collection are available for viewing, and in many cases, for download, through the University of Miami Libraries Digital Collections.