Local History: The Tulsa and Oklahoma Collection at Tulsa City-County Library
From the Beryl Ford Collection
Books
City Directories 1909-present City directories are a great resource for finding people. Entries often include occupation and adult children living in a household. Beginning in 1912, the directories may be searched in a reverse manner as the streets are listed alphabetically. This collection is available in both print and microfilm formats. TCCL is in the process of digitizing the directories that are in the public domain (before 1923). The digitized directories are available here.
Telephone Directories 1931-present The telephone directories include both residential and business listings and cover a greater geographic area than the city directories.
Cross Reference Directories 1944-present Cross reference directories in the collection are organized by telephone number and by street address.
Yearbooks Yearbooks are actively collected for schools in the City of Tulsa. Some of the Library’s other locations collect yearbooks for the schools in their area. A list of schools and yearbook titles in our collection can be found on the local history subject guide.
Newspapers and Periodicals
The local history subject guide contains a timeline of the Library's newspaper and periodical archives and points to newspaper directories and online newspapers available from other sources.
Vertical Files
The Tulsa City-County Library vertical files collection contains hundreds of thousands of items dating from the 1930s to present day, with the majority of items ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s.
The collection is exclusively devoted to primary resources that document Tulsa and Oklahoma history. Framework of such documents may be civic, educational, biographical, commercial, or cultural in nature. In many cases, these items are not known to exist elsewhere.
The bulk of the collection consists of newspaper and magazine clippings of individual articles, as well as some spiral bound books, softcover books, and ephemera. Ephemera is defined by Library of Congress as “non-commercial, non-book publications in the form of pamphlets, handbills, leaflets, broadsides, position papers, minutes of meetings, information sheets, bulletins, newsletters, posters, moving images, photographic documentation, etc.”
Items are compiled by subject as classified by the Library of Congress Subject Headings and are housed in legal-sized folders or envelopes. These folders are divided into two major areas, Tulsa metropolitan and greater Oklahoma, and are arranged alphabetically by subject within cabinets at the Central Library Research Center at Tulsa City-County Library. Patrons are at liberty to peruse these files without special permission. Some folders whose contents have been determined by library staff as too delicate, rare, or liable to theft, are filed in the staff workroom. Patrons may view these files upon request.
Digital Collections
The Library provides access to oral histories, texts, postcards, and thousands of historical Tulsa and Oklahoma photographs, including the Beryl Ford Collection, online.
Unknown Places -- All of the photos in this set belong to the Beryl Ford Collection and are photos for which Tulsa City-County Library has no identifying information. Do you recognize anything or anyone in these photos? If so, we'd like your feedback to help us identify them. Please leave a comment on a specified photo with the identifying information and we will then work with you to conclusively identify the photo in question. Note: In this historic collection, dates following "this photo was taken" are assigned by Flickr and are associated with the dates that the items were scanned, not the dates of the original images.
Unknown People -- All of the photos in this set belong to the Beryl Ford Collection and are photos for which Tulsa City-County Library has no identifying information. Do you recognize anything or anyone in these photos? If so, we'd like your feedback to help us identify them. Please leave a comment on a specified photo with the identifying information and we will then work with you to conclusively identify the photo in question. Note: In this historic collection, dates following "this photo was taken" are assigned by Flickr and are associated with the dates that the items were scanned, not the dates of the original images.
Contact Information
The Tulsa and Oklahoma Collection is located in the Research Center of Central Library. To reach the Research Center, call the AskUs Hotline: 918-549-7323, send an email to [email protected], text askTCCL to 66746 or IM a reference librarian here.
