About

Nebraskaland Magazine, including its previous titles—Outdoor Nebraska, Outdoor NEBRASKAland, and NEBRASKAland—has been published since 1926 by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and its previous entities, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture Bureau of Game and Fish and the Nebraska Game, Forestation and Parks Commission.

With outstanding photography and engaging storytelling at its core, Nebraskaland promotes the stewardship and conservation of Nebraska’s natural resources and outdoor spaces. Its pages showcase the many outdoor opportunities available across the state—hunting, fishing, camping, boating, and wildlife viewing among them—within the state parks system and beyond. People, too, are at the heart of Nebraskaland. As a whole, the magazine offers a rich, century-long chronicle of Nebraska’s history and culture.

No single repository houses the entire run of Nebraskaland. The earliest issues of Outdoor Nebraska are especially rare. With the goal of presenting the magazine in its entirety, the Nebraskaland Magazine Digital Archive makes available page scans from print issues held by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and both the University of Nebraska and Nebraska Wesleyan University libraries, as well as born-digital documents created by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.

Project History

Creation of this digital space has been and continues to be a collaborative and iterative process, made possible by the work of many individuals across multiple organizations, including the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission (NGPC), Nebraska Library Commission (NLC), Cochrane-Woods Library of Nebraska Wesleyan University (NWU), and Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

NGPC created page scans for issues spanning the years 1926-1951, many of which were digitized as part of a 2011 project with the NLC, using physical print issues in the NGPC archives, supplemented with volumes loaned to NGPC by NWU.  From 2015 to 2017, NGPC scanned additional missing back issues on loan from UNL. NGPC created Nebraskaland pages as born-digital documents from the April 2004 issue forward. In 2017, NGPC partnered with UNL’s CDRH to digitize the full run of the magazine. The CDRH scanned print copies of back issues from 1952-2006, on loan from NGPC. The CDRH then transcribed all issues from 1926-2006 using Optical Character Recognition software and following Text Encoding Initiative standards to encode the transcriptions in XML documents. For born-digital documents, text was extracted directly from PDF files into HTML, with page images displayed in a PDF viewer.

When the project initially launched in May 2020, it was designed by the CDRH using Ruby on Rails and hosted by UNL, with content from 1926 through July 1977. Issues from August-December 1977 were added in 2022. In 2025, the site was expanded to include all issues from 1926 through 2025, underwent server and platform migration utilizing Omeka S, was redesigned to accommodate new server and platform requirements, introduced expanded search features, and project management was transferred to NGPC.

Editorial Statement

Content transcribed using Optical Character Recogintion (OCR) software or extracted from born-digital files is not proofread or corrected. However, in OCR transcriptions, project staff have attempted to proof and standardize headlines, bylines, and captions, and, whenever possible, paragraph breaks were added and end-line hyphenation removed from the editorial content. Advertising content and tables have been left as read by OCR. Page layout is not replicated in the textual transcriptions, but may be viewed in the page images.

Sensitive Content

As an archive comprised of historical materials published since 1926, some of the content contains racial and gender stereotypes. Likewise, some of the information presented regarding game, fish, wildlife, conservation, and outdoor recreation best practices is no longer current. While that content is presented without censure in an effort to make available the entire run of the magazine, we do so without necessarily endorsing the views represented at the time of their original publication.

Copyright

The Nebraskaland Magazine Digital Archive as a whole—as well as the text, images, and other items contained in it—are protected under the copyright laws of the United States and the Universal Copyright Convention.

Subscribe

For subscription information and to purchase a current or back isssue, please visit the Nebraskaland page on the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission website.

Contact Us

Credits

Project Director

• Jaclyn Cruikshank Vogt, Photo Librarian, Nebraskaland Magazine/Nebraska Game and Parks Commission

CDRH Staff

• Erin Kay Chambers, Front End Developer
• Karin Dalziel, Assistant Director, Digital Strategies
• William Dewey, Programmer/Analyst II
• Andrew Jewell, CDRH Co-Director
• Chad Koch, Digital Project Specialist
• Laura Weakly, Metadata Encoding Specialist
• Jessica Zaruba, Digital Projects Coordinator

Past CDRH Faculty and Staff

• Jessica Dussault, Digital Humanities Programmer and Analyst
• Justine Elliott, Newspaper Associate
• Andy Pederson, DISC Office Associate
• Greg Tunink, Digitial Humanitites Programmer and Analyst
• Katherine Walter, CDRH Co-Director

Past Graduate Research Assistants

• Steph Camerone
• Alexis Cruz
• Phillip Howells
• Caitlin Mathesis

Past Undergraduate Assistants

• Katrina Bergantzel
• Sara Duke
• Hallie Miller
• Ashley Morrison
• Brian Mock
• Lauren Nunez
• Christian Parrish
• Grace Ridgley
• Grace Rittscher
• Whitney Rittscher
• Em Secoske
• Kitty Tran
• Sonyeli Torres