Allen County Public Library: Difference between revisions

The Fred J. Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection is the second-largest genealogy collection in the United States<ref>"Allen County Public Library" in ''Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia'' at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_County_Public_Library (accessed 28 April 2010).</ref> and the largest genealogy collection in a public library. Its holdings include more than 350,000 printed volumes and 513,000 items on microfilm and microfiche.<ref name="ACPLGC">"Genealogy Center" in ''Allen County Public Library'' at http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/genealogy/ (accessed 28 April 2010).</ref> Users in Fort Wayne also have access, for a small fee, to more than 2 million additional microfilms from the [[Family History Library]] in Salt Lake City. ACPL creates the [[Periodical Source Index (PERSI)|Periodical Source Index (PERSI)]], a subject index to genealogy and local history periodicals from all over the United States and Canada, including French Canadian journals. PERSI is created from the Center's premier collection of more than 5,100 current genealogy periodical subscriptions, as well as runs of numerous ceased serial titles.  

The Genealogy Center primarily is a North American collection, with a complementary focus on British Isles and some German materials. It also holds guidebooks, methodology works, heraldry titles and similar items of general focus for other countries. ACPL has more than 50,000 family histories, nearly 200,000 local histories, a significant number of North Carolina records on microfilm, and numerous important collections such as the Draper Manuscripts, the Drouin Collection, the Barber Collection, and many National Archives microfilm collections. The Genealogy Center also has significant resources for Native American and African American research. Specifically, the [http://www.genealogycenter.info/africanamerican/ African American Gateway] is a database of several thousand links to African American resources on the Internet, coupled with a bibliography of resources for African American research in the Genealogy Center's holdings. A large collection of early city directories on microfilm complements the hundreds of post-1960 print directories obtained by the Genealogy Center as a repository for the Polk Directory Company. For more details see [http://www.genealogycenter.org Genealogy Center] and the [http://acpl.aquabrowser.com/?skin=genealogy ACPL Genealogy Center catalog].