promotional graphic for Gale Indigenous Peoples of North America featuring images of native people from the collection

ZSR Library recently acquired access to Gale Indigenous Peoples of North America (IPNA) through our membership in NCLIVE. NCLIVE is a statewide library cooperative that supports public and academic libraries across North Carolina.

IPNA is a wonderful addition to our existing resources to support research on native and Indigenous peoples.

The 52 collections included in Gale Indigenous Peoples of North America total 1.4 million documents that span from 1665-1988. Materials range from government documents to maps to Indigenous newspapers to handwritten correspondence to Census rolls and more. While many of the documents are in English, there are also materials in Indigenous languages and other languages. Using Advanced Search, you can limit your search by content type, document type, language, and more.

Since many tribes have multiple names (including those they call themselves, as well as the names ascribed to them by others), IPNA uses OCR and AI to help group documents together, regardless of the name being searched. More information on this feature can be found in this blog post by Winn W. Wasson, a social science librarian at Syracuse University.

If you are interested in learning more about this new collection and how to incorporate into your teaching and research, please reach out to me at shielddk@wfu.edu or to your library liaison!