As North Dakota Quarterly lumbers toward its 90th volume, we have turned one eye toward our archive. In fact, our archive of back issues one of our greatest assets as a publication and whenever we approach a milestone, I like to direct some attention to the archive.

This fall, I’ve worked with a great group of students in an editing and publishing practicum. They’ve worked to digitize issues of NDQ published between 2007 and 2017. This involved removing the spines from select issues.

Then we made sure that all the pages were separate,

ran them through a high speed scanner,

recombined the scanned text,

and, finally, reviewed the scans for quality control purposes.

The result is a new, expanded, and almost complete archive, which you can check out here.

You’ll notice that most of the new additions to the archive come at the end of the fourth series, which ran until 2011 and the addition of the fifth series which continues to today. Issues published after 2018 are available from our publishing partner at the University of Nebraska Press.

Eagle-eyed readers will undoubtedly notice that we’re missing a few issues: 75.3/4 and 26.1 somehow slipped through the cracks in our system. But these readers will also notice that we now welcomed two previously absent issues into the archival fold: 24.1(pdf) and 57.2 (pdf). Issue 24.1 is particularly significant because it is the first issue published after NDQ’s hiatus during the Great Depression and World War II.

If you’re struggling to know where to start to engage with the archive, I’d nudge you toward one of our several collections (which we’ll update with links to more recent articles very soon):

North Dakota Quarterly and the Great War.

Hemingway in the Quarterly.

McGrath in the Quarterly.

The NDQ Reader: Volume 1.

So as the long, cold, blustery North Dakota winter approaches, I encourage anyone looking for something to read to delve into our archive.