"Norwegian-American imprints" (or NAI's) include publications written in (Dano-)Norwegian and published in the United States between roughly 1850 and 1930.
The NAI collection at Rolvaag Memorial Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota is the largest and most extensive one in the United States. These materials have been collected over the past decades by former librarian O. M. Norlie, former library director and archivist Forrest Brown, and others. Many of the titles were donated by the authors themselves.
While these books had been previously shelved in the regular library stacks, a major effort was made between 1989 and 2004 to transfer these titles to the Vault and to enter the catalog record into the libraries' online catalog.. Between 1996 and 1999 this effort was supported by generous grants from the Nygaard Foundation. Although most of these titles had been manually cataloged via the library's card catalog, the effort of cataloging them online and transferring them to the Vault required extensive re-cataloging and re-classification. In general, only one copy (the best of all copies owned) is shelved in the Vault. For certain special items, a second copy is shelved also in the stacks. With certain exceptions, these materials may be checked out for a short period and are loaned via Interlibrary Loan.
The Norwegian American Imprint Collection is searchable in the St Olaf College Libraries' online catalog "Bridge" as a separate collection (listed as "STO Norwegian American Collection" under the pull-down menu from "View all collections").
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