Maryland State Library Resource Center

Enoch Pratt Free Library

Periodicals Department - Maryland State Library Resource Center

Periodicals Department

Periodicals DepartmentThe Periodicals Department provides customers access to local, national, and international news resources, both current and historical. Its large retrospective collection gives customers access to a variety of primary source materials, and its indexes are helpful tools for current and historical research.

Subject Areas:

  • Literary & Criticism
  • Public Affairs
  • News
  • Trade
  • Popular magazines
  • Peer-reviewed journals in most fields of study

Collections of Note:

Historical Baltimore and Maryland Newspapers
This collection consists of microfilmed historical newspapers from towns, cities, and counties around Maryland as well as ethnic, denominational, neighborhood, and city-wide papers from Baltimore City.  A few of these papers date back to the Eighteenth Century. They can be read on the department’s state-of-the-art digital reader/scanner/printers.

Retrospective Collection of Magazines and Journals
The department has a large retrospective collection of popular magazines, trade magazines, and scholarly journals, some dating as far back as the Eighteenth Century. Its collection of popular women’s magazines dates back to 1819.

Personal Papers
The department holds several collections of personal papers on microfilm from notable local figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Louis Mencken, and John Pendleton Kennedy.

Indexes
Complete sets of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (1890-present) and Poole’s Index (1880-1906) reside in the department as well as many other periodicals indexes and book review indexes.

Statewide Training & Events

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